Badda bing Badda boom!

Please I beg you - don't be this guy. This is the badda bing, badda boom guy. The guy that starts calling partner prospects "because hey, we need partners!" without a thoughtful strategy.

I know the temptation to do this can be strong, especially if you work at a small company, or if you are under pressure at a larger one. But calling a partner prospect, without understaning why you are calling and why they should care, is a big mistake.

I've been there. While working for a startup, one of the founders came into my office one day and said "we have to partner with XYZ company, we need them!" When I said, "yes, but why do they need us?" he had no ready answer. I suggested we might want to wait until we thought this through before making that first call.

There are three things you must do before making that first call if you want to make a good first impression, and they are not always easy, especially #1.

1. Know your company's product strategy. This can be difficult for small companies, but I've found this to be a challenge at high tech companies of all sizes. With technology,  you can "do anything", so NIH (not invented here) mentality is often a barrier.
2. Know what's in it for the partner. This requires you to understand their business. Walk in their shoes. Understand their market pressures and aspirations. Do your homework!
3. Develop a "partnering proposition". This is critical. Your partnering proposition should articulate what it is you are proposing to do together. Since it's a strawman proposal - a starting point, you may not end up here, but please do not make the prospect figure out what you're asking to do!  Tell them. Simply. And make it as compelling as you can. "Here's what we do, here's what you do, we'd like to collaborate to deliver X and this is how it will benefit you and our mutual customers."

For more on developing a partnering proposition, see this Partnering Proposition Worksheet I developed for use in exploratory partnership discussions.

In the "friend zone"

I was having lunch with an alliance colleague a few months agoand he was diagnosing a problem with one of our alliance relationships. He said the problem we're having is that the partner was "treating us like a partner instead of like a client."

He went on to say, that if we were a client, they would be doing everything they could to understand our organizational structure, our culture, our internal capabilities, etc, in order to build a strategy for success. In other words we were relegated to "the friend zone".

It got me thinking that good alliance managers should use some of the same techniques to understand how to navigate and understand their partner's organization that good sales people use to understand the same about their customers'.

For example, the Global Alliance Manager on one of our key partnerships built an influence map of her partner's organization. For each key partner executive, her team identified their:

• Authority and influence
• Attitude toward our company (positive, neutral, negative)
• Personal style
• Relationships with other influencers

She's found this map very helpful in explaining the partner organization to internal executives and for understanding how to build support for joint initiatives.

There's a great article on influence maps on the Mind Tools website here.