Soft skills matter!

I get a little crazy when I hear people refer to critical alliance management skills as "soft skills". There is absolutely nothing "soft" about the skills we employ as alliance professionals to establish, develop and manage alliance relationships!

Alliance managers with skills in verbal and written communications, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, alignment and negotiation - create winning alliance partnerships.

Companies with alliance managers lacking these skills don't make good partners. They do things like:

• Call you with 24 hours notice telling you they're "bringing an exec with them to the meeting and can you set up a meeting with your VP of Sales". Ah no.
• Insist you connect them with your sales rep without providing a compelling reason for the connection.
• Continually promote their interests without attending to your company's interests.
• Set up exploratory calls with my company with a ton of their stakeholders on the line without having had "the call before the call" to get his team aligned before engaging us.

These are but a few examples I've experienced. These moves didn't exactly inspire confidence. I'm careful with my credibility and chits with stakeholders. I won't put my internal credibility on the line for a partner that doesn't understand basic alliance management principles.

Deploying unskilled alliance managers on your partnerships has a material impact on whether or not companies want to partner with you. Over the years, I have de-prioritized partners who assigned unskilled alliance managers to manage the relationship.

If a partner doesn't value the partnership enough to assign skilled professionals to manage it then neither do I!