Happy New Year to my fellow alliance professionals! After a hiatus and the holiday break, I'm back in the blogger's chair..
As we are all in the midst of our 2012 joint business planning efforts with our partners, it's a good time for a few reminders to our alliance stakeholders about what's involved in establishing and developing partnerships.
To that end, I bring you - The Top 5 Things Stakeholders Should Know About Alliances.
1.
Alliance
Relationships Require Care and Feeding
Alliance
relationships are much like personal relationships, they require care and
feeding to establish and grow. Alliance relationships are made up of a series
of personal relationships between executives and stakeholders at both companies. Managing these relationships, developing the shared vision and constructing
and executing the joint business plan, is the raison d’etre of the Alliance
Manager. All alliances are established based on a promise of mutual value. The
role of the Alliance Manager is “value creation” – orchestrating resources,
aligning strategic goals, managing conflict to ensure that your company (and the
partner) deliver increased value to our customers.
2.
It takes a
village
In today’s
increasingly complex and interdependent world, it often “takes a village” to
deliver a complete solution to the customer. For example, your company may have world class technologies
and solutions in multiple industries and horizontal domains. Your partners may bring
strong business consulting and domain expertise, scalable delivery capability,
complementary technologies and solutions and in many cases, supplementary
understanding of your customers’ business issues and environments.
Together
with your partner ecosystem, your company is able to extend its capabilities to maximize
value to the customer.
3.
Customer demand
often drives partnerships
Your customers might express a need for a third party provider’s unique and niche capabilities
and may request integration of the third party’s software with yours. Or your Partner’s
customer may be making the same request of your partner. Or your company may identify a need to
collaborate with a third party to address market demand driven by customer
requirements in a certain industry or domain. These are the three major drivers
of partnerships.
4.
Alliances help drive
innovation!
At SAS, we are
collaborating with partners in many of our key technology innovations (e.g.
high performance computing) and partners also provide benchmarking/tuning/optimization
and new technology adoption support.
In addition to
supporting your company's technology innovation, partners also help identify new
opportunities, in which we collaborate to deliver joint initiatives.
5.
Alliance Management
is profession!
Most of
the alliance professionals in SAS Global Alliances and Channels division are certified
alliance professionals, who have earned their certification through The
Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). ASAP is the largest
global professional organization dedicated to alliance formation and management. Additionally, SAS is a Global Sponsor of ASAP and we have been encouraging our key partners to
become members as well. We leverage ASAP best practices in our work. This helps
both our partner community and by extension, our customers, because as a
result, we are able to more effectively develop partnerships to create and
deliver innovative solutions for our customers.
