Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances - #3

Alliances Make the Pie Bigger

There is sometimes a misconception that working with partners is a “zero sum game”  - the more money a partner makes on a deal, the less money your company will make on a deal. In actual fact, more times than not, a partner will help make the size of the pie bigger – “supersize” the deal if you will. How? In a few ways.

1) Scale

At my company, we have several partners that are much larger organizations with thousands of employees and deep presence in Fortune 500 firms. We also have a very large network of smaller partners, who may not have the same reach as the larger partners, but do have deep domain expertise in areas where we need it, and are "boots on the ground" for us in many accounts.  In both instances, partnering with these firms enhances our reach, drives customer satisfaction, and extends our influence.     

2) The vision thing
Many customers have at least one "trusted adviser" consulting organization that they engage at the C level to advise them on vision and strategy. These firms have significant influence with customers and in the IT industry, determine or influence the "stack" (software/hardware solution components) that is ultimately sold to the customer. Partnering with these firms early can put you in the "pole position" in this process and uncover opportunities that you did not even know were there. And turn what for you might have been a departmental sale ($) into a much larger enterprise ($$$) sale. 

3) Access to new markets
Often companies will use partners to establish their presence in new geographic markets. In this case, partners not only increase the size of the pie, they serve up the pie, too!


4) Deal acceleration
Partners can really help provide account intelligence that help you identify potential risks to deal closure. Partners can also help you mitigate those risks to help increase the odds of closure. They can also help validate your solution (through Proof of Concept support for example) and can accelerate your sales cycle, helping you close deals faster. All of these efforts increase your revenues.

Next post - Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances -  #4 : Alliances Help Drive Innovation

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know about Alliances - #2

    Alliances are a Team Sport

The alliances organization is a completely dependent organization  – that is to say, we are completely dependent upon the involvement of other organizations to successfully develop and execute alliances. When we make a commitment to a partner, we are making a corporate commitment to that partner on behalf of our company. This means that many organizations at our company (sales, product marketing, product management, professional services, legal, field marketing, external communications, etc.) have a role to play and will be engaged early and often as we establish and develop partnerships.

Therefore, as an executive, in order to ensure high performing alliances, it's not only important that you have strong collaboration skills within your alliances organization, you must also ensure that these skills permeate across the company. You want an "alliance aware" organization - where all the departments that are involved in establishing and developing alliances understand how to collaborate, manage conflict, ensure alignment and drive positive outcomes for BOTH companies.

Alliances are a team sport!

Next post: #3 Alliances Make the Pie Bigger