Can't Get No Respect!

I often hear alliance managers complain that our roles are not valued by our organization. That company executives don't appreciate the value of alliances. That "alliances can't get any respect" in the organization.

While a lot of this grousing is somewhat justified - we have made great strides in our profession over the years, but we do have a ways to go - I do find myself challenging my colleagues on the grousing from time to time.

When a fellow alliance colleague comes to me complaining about his organization's ambivalence towards alliances, I ask a few questions:

• Do you have a formal, consistent process for qualifying, developing and executing new partners and new initiatives?
• Do you have a formal approval process for new partner ventures?
• Have all internal stakeholder roles and responsibilities been clearly defined, documented and agreed to?
• Does your Alliances Management team treat the alliance managers on the team like professionals? Is there a formal career path? Are there alliance training/professional development plans in place?
• Is your company a member of ASAP (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals) and do you have certified alliance professionals on staff?
• Are strategic alliance teams staffed with people with the right skills and experience to do the job effectively?
• Is there formal alliance measurement and reporting in place to company executives? 
• Do your partners clearly understand what's expected of them and the partnership in order to drive value for your company?
• Do you have documented joint business plans and quarterly business reviews in place for each of your most strategic partnerships?
• Are alliances managed as a portfolio with periodic inspection on performance? Are poor performing alliances addressed or are alliance relationships like the roach motel - they check in but never check out?!  

I'm not saying that doing these things guarantees that alliances will be respected in your organization - but you will at least have done your part to earn the respect, which is "table stakes" for discussions.

We can't expect our organizations to change, if we aren't willing to do so. Change must start with us!

Captains of Change - Part V: Making Course Corrections

In the last several posts, I've been talking about the role Alliance Managers as "captains of change" in managing alliance relationships. This is Part V: Making Course Corrections.

Making course corrections on the journey goes hand in hand with Part III - Measure & Inspect.  As Alliance Managers, once we develop the joint business plan with our partner, we must "inspect what we expect"in order to ensure that our plans are on track and delivering results. You can't know what to correct if you aren't measuring progress and results!

In my company's journey to improve our alliance competencies, we created a process for consistently qualifying, approving and launching joint partner initiatives. We managed these initiatives as a portfolio and measured them against performance standards - revenue, pipeline, sales traction. We discovered that the #1 reason for failure of a partner initiative was lack of sales sponsorship.

The course correction we made was to require a sales executive sponsor for all partner initiatives. This change improved our success rates.

Any successful alliance journey should include course corrections!