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!

Survival Tips for "Flying Solo" in an Alliance

I often say that the alliance manager plays a role similar to an airplane pilot when it comes to managing a strategic alliance relationship. Like pilots, alliance managers are responsible for getting the alliance "off the ground", navigating the partnership through turbulence and weather conditions (changing market conditions, competing interests, conflicting organizational models, competitive threats, etc.), and "landing safely" (delivering the goals of the alliance).

Throughout the flight, we have to get our passengers - internal and external stakeholders (sales, marketing, legal, professional services, etc.) aligned so we can achieve alliance results. During most flights, an airplane will be off course for about 95% of its flight. Similarly, during the life of an alliance, the alliance manager has to work continuously to keep the partnership on course. Alliance management, like fllying looks effortless, but doing it well requires a lot of skill and expertise.

Pilots usually partner with skilled co-pilots to build successful flight plans and coordinate actions during flight. Alliance managers on strategic, complex partnerships also work with a "co-pilot" - their alliance counterpart at the partner's organization - to help build the joint alliance plan, manage conflict, and navigate the partnership.

But what do you do when you are "flying solo" - when you don't have an alliance manager assigned to the partnership from the partner's company?

1. Determine if you're flying a "Cessna or a Dreamliner". 
• If this is "Cessna" - a partnership with a start-up or a small partner - it's highly unlikely that they'll have a full time alliance manager on staff. Just make sure the person they assign to work with you on the partnership has authority to make decisions and expect that you are going to have to lead the joint development and execution process. If this is a "Dreamliner", and this is a strategic partnership with a large company, you are going to need a skilled co-pilot to get this thing off the ground. Without one, expect a very bumpy ride.
2. Build your Flight Plan. 
• Weather you're flying a Cessna or a Dreamliner, if you're flying solo you really need to make sure you have a flight plan. Your flight plan, or alliance execution plan is what you'll use to ensure you get to your destination. Without a co-pilot, you'll be doing most of the heavy lifting. 
3. Communicate frequently with the "Control Tower". 
• Identify and build strong connections and relationships with executive sponsors at the partner's company. Without an alliance counterpart, you'll might not get a lot of assistance navigating the partner organization and building executive relationships, but it will be critical that you identify executive sponsors and get them connected with their counterparts within your company. You will need to ensure that you understand their interests and that you align the partner plan to support their interests and the interests of your internal sponsors.
4. Plan for turbulence. 
• Even under the best of circumstances, alliance management can be challenging work with lots of ups and downs. Good alliance managers always plan for contingencies and identify and manage risk. Flying solo adds another level of risk to the flight, so you'll need to set expectations with your executive sponsors accordingly. 

Follow these survival tips and you'll help guide your partnership through friendlier skies!

Oil and Water DO mix

Recently I heard a chef being interviewed on the radio discussing his book on cooking myths. He said the biggest cooking myth is adage that oil and water don't mix. According to the chef, oil and water DO mix - when you add an emulsifying agent.

That got me thinking about the role of Alliance Managers. We are great emulsifying agents!

Our job is to keep things that don't normally stick together - like say two account execs from two different companies - together. Left to their own devices, two sales reps from two different companies can be like oil and water - they will not stay together without an emulsifying agent. Enter the alliance manager.

The role of the alliance manager is to keep the radio tuned to every reps favorite radio station - WIIFM or What's In it For Me. We've got to make it clear to both reps what's in it for each of them to collaborate, and we have to build a bridge of trust between the two parties. At SAS we use an Account Introduction Form (AIF) and an Account Engagement Agreement (AEA) to set expectations, build trust and provide a framework for the sales collaboration.

Key "emulsifying" skills for alliance managers are alignment, conflict management and resolution, negotiation, and most of all - strong EQ or emotional intelligence.

Alliance managers employing these skills will keep their alliances "sticking together."

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances, #5 It's Not (just) About Us!

It's Not (just) About Us!

To get what we want in a partnership, we have to have at least passing interest in what our partner wants. This seems like such a simple concept, but it's amazing how many executives lose sight of this. As alliance professionals, if we're advocating for the partner, it's not because we've "gone native", its because we recognize that if we don't work within our organization to ensure that our partner's interests are being met, we will never get the partner to deliver to our interests.

Alliance management is about aligning interests - ours and theirs. We have to be clear about what we want, and we have to be equally as clear about what our partner wants.

I worked with a sales exec many years ago who was fond of saying "bad deals don't last" - meaning that if we use short term leverage to coerce our partners into getting what we want, while completely subordinating their urgent interests, the partner will always find a way out of the deal, I don't care what's in the contract.

So, if this is a partnership we care about - one where they have something to offer that we need (is there any other kind?) - then we must attend to their interests. When we are at the table with our partner, putting our interests on the table and looking for alignment on mutual interests, then and only then, will we have a shot at realizing the potential of the alliance relationship.

So, the next time you are in a meeting with a partner executive, sometimes the best question you can ask them is "What do you want?"

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances, #4 Don't Try This At Home

Don't Try This at Home

In the most recent IBM CEO Study, top performing companies were more than 28% more likely to leverage partnerships for innovation than their under performing counterparts. Top performing firms value collaborative skills and recognize that recruiting and developing people with these skills are critical to their competitive success.

My boss is fond of saying that Alliance management is a profession - not a hobby. Alliance Management requires a specific skill set. Good alliance managers don't grow on trees, they are not a dime a dozen. Good alliance managers have good business savvy, strong conflict management skills, good "EQ"- emotional intelligence, and strong political and organization navigation skills.

You wouldn't put an unskilled sales rep to manage a strategic customer account, so why would you take someone who couldn't cut it in sales and put them on a strategic partnership?

To drive innovation through alliances, bring in the professionals!

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

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know about Alliances - #1

As alliance managers, sometimes our biggest sales job of all is convincing our internal executives of the value of alliances and what it takes to make them successful. Among the key questions we need to answer are:

• What is involved in establishing new partnerships? 
• Why do we need partners? 
• What do alliance managers do anyway? 
• Why do I care?

Do you get these questions from your executives? 


In my next several posts I'll cover the Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to 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 both our company and our partner realize mutual value.

Next post - #2: Alliances are a Team Sport

Managing Differences - Job #1

One of my most important takeaways from Vantage Partner's Alliance University last month was the whole idea that alliances at their core, are about managing differences.

We've all heard people say that alliances are all about "finding the win-win", "looking for the joint value proposition", finding "common ground" and the like. It turns out, that while those things are important, even necessary in forging an alliance relationship, they are not sufficient.

Why?

Well, think about it. According to various studies, alliances have a 50% (or higher depending on the study) failure rate. Presumably, the alliances formed based on identified "common ground" or compelling "joint value proposition", but they didn't last. When I look back at failed partnerships in my 15+ years in alliances, the root cause of the failures was a lack of attention paid to the differences between the two organizations.

Alliance managers sit in between two organizations with different structures, business models, politics, org charts, policies, cultures, philosophies, processes, contracts, etc. etc. The list of differences is usually longer than the list of things we have in common!

When we just focus on the things we have in common, the things our two companies are completely aligned on, and ignore the long list of things where we are not aligned - where we have differences - we are inviting the inevitable conflict. Often that conflict simmers under the surface, but it is always there, like a cancer on the alliance relationship. Left untreated, the patient - our partnership - dies.

Instead, we should proactively, deliberately and intentionally, work with our partner to identify our areas of difference, with particular focus on those areas that are likely to cause conflict. It is a fool's errand to pretend that we can wish away or hope away these differences. A better strategy is to face them head on, and talk openly as a joint team about how we can manage these differences.

Managing differences is job #1 for alliance managers!

Curiosity Killed the Cat (but Saved the Alliance)

More from Vantage Partner's Alliance University class delivered by Stu Kliman.

Curiosity - genuine and honest curiosity, is a critical mindset for successful alliance managers. This is the mindset for effective conflict resolution. Why?

When we are in the midst of conflict with our partner or with an internal stakeholder, we tend to assume our intentions are good (and we are "right"), but we don't always extend the benefit of the doubt to our partners. We assume we understand their intentions (bad) and that we are in full possession of all the facts.

The fact is, the only thing we know with certainty is what's going on in our own head!

Understanding our partner's interests and intents requires breaking through our "certainty" and adopting a mindset of curiosity. "Hmmn, she has a completely different take on this situation than I do. I wonder what data she's looking at? I wonder what's her reasoning is? I wonder why she feels this way". These are the questions that start a learning dialog.

And curiosity, genuine and true curiosity about our partners interests and intents, is the starting point to resolving conflict in our alliance relationships.

Mind the Gap

Stu Kliman from Vantage Partners did an excellent session for our alliances organization last week on conflict management and resolution. My takeaways from this session, which we called SAS Alliance University, will be the subject of several blog posts.

My first takeaway I call "Mind The Gap". No, not the ubiquitous retail store!

Stu kicked off the session with a video of a difficult conversation between two alliance managers and he asked us to identify "helpful and unhelpful" behaviors. We all proceeded to diagnose the root causes of the conflict and develop a list of the "unhelpful" comments from both parties.

Stu posited that if you could put these two alliance managers in our class and have them watch the same video, they would have no problem identifying the problem behaviors. In other words, "out of the moment" they could dispassionately diagnose the "good, the bad and the ugly." We are the same way - often we know what the right thing thing to do is, but in the moment, we fail to do the right thing.

Why?

When we are in conflict ridden alliance conversations, the stakes are usually high. The success of the alliance is often on the line, and the expectations and pressure to deliver are high. This ratchets up our emotions and increases the likelihood of a bad outcome.

Stu calls this phenomenon - the "gap between our espoused beliefs and our practiced beliefs."

What does it require to close this gap? Humility and deliberate, intentional effort to practice good conflict management and resolution techniques. I'll cover these in subsequent posts.

Ironically, the more arrogant someone is about their conflict management skills, the larger the gap is between their espoused and practiced beliefs! To develop your alliance skills in this area - mind the gap!

Zero Sum Game

I think you can boil down most of the issues we face in alliance management to "scarcity mentality". Folks with scarcity mentality view life (and alliances) as a zero sum game. If you win, I lose. If I win, you lose.

Those who view the world from this perspective, have a very hard time collaborating. Viewing partnerships from this prism causes their mindset to be very self focused and "shrinks" their universe. Their "pie" is small, and their life is a constant battle to win turf, presumably at the expense of someone else. It's hard to think creatively about options and fresh new approaches when crouched in the fighting stance ready for battle!

The best cultural mindset for positive partnering and collaboration is an "abundance" mindset. You can always tell when you are dealing with a partner with this mentality. The possibilities are limitless. Collaboration with them is about making the pie bigger, not fighting over pieces of a small pie.

Let's do all we can as alliance managers to promote this mindset in our organizations - and be sure that we walk in this mindset ourselves.

Five Rules! (or Badda Bing Badda Boom Part II)

The picture above was me (metaphorically) after sitting through a conference call with a company who wanted to talk about partnering with my company. As you can see from the picture, it was not a great experience. It still amazes me how many alliance people schedule exploratory partnership conversations, but then don't take the time to prepare for those discussions!

To prevent this from happening to others, I bring you the Five Rules for Having an Exploratory Partnership Conversation!

Rule #1. Tell me what you want!

If you approach me, the onus is on YOU, to explain what you want - where you see the value in a potential partnership. Don't leave it to me to "intuit" your proposal, or guess what you want us to do together.

Rule #2. It's all about me.

I'm already working on more than I can say grace over. You want me to attend to you and this potential partnership. This means I've got to figure out what I'm not going to do so that I can do this. Which means you need to sell me on why I should care. What's in it for me?  I don't care what your alliance and product strategy is - unless it's directly relevant to what you are proposing and its value to me. Set your radio to my favorite radio station - WIIFM (What's in it for me?) and make your message compelling.

Rule #3. Know what my company does.

This might seem obvious, but as my grandmother was fond of saying "common sense ain't so common". I've gotten calls from companies who had not even bothered to look at my company's website to understand our solutions and key industry segments. It will be difficult for you to craft a compelling value proposition, much less a partnering proposition, if you don't know what I do.


Rule #4. Have a clear call to action or next step.

Loosey goosey close is simply inviting me put this at the bottom of the pile. If you get my attention, have a clear next step identified. Who do we need to engage next? What do we need to cover? How do we complete the due diligence process to get to EOJ?

Rule #5. PREPARE before you get on the phone with me!

Rules 1 through 4 pretty much indicate that you've got to do your homework. Do not throw your standard 25 slide company presentation at me and expect me to "figure it out"! Think through your pitch, develop a compelling story and "serve it up to me on a biscuit!" - meaning, clearly articulate what you want and why I should care.


Follow these rules and the odds of you having a productive dialog with your partner prospect will go up exponentially. Even if you wind up mutually determining that this is not a good partnership opportunity, at least you will have left a favorable impression, and that will do nothing but help you in the future!

The Bermuda Triangle and partner triangulation

According to Wikipedia "The Bermuda Triangle is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances.


The "Alliance Bermuda Triangle" is typically where partners wind up when attempting "triangulation" - the pursuit of that elusive holy grail resulting from the coming together of 3 companies.


It typically goes like this..... you're working with a partner on an initiative, and he mentions, "hey, we have a partnership with Acme Technologies, we should loop them in to our discussions.  There's typically lots of enthusiasm in the beginning after a series of exploratory discussions...Lots of IGBG - "it's gonna be great" and then..... nothing.


Why? Because getting alignment between two companies is challenging enough. Adding a third to the mix increases the complexity (and risk) by an order of magnitude.


I'm not saying it can't work... I've seen a few. Just know what you're getting into, ask a lot of questions and set expectations all around.

Top 5 Things to Know About Alliances!

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.

We've Got the Power!

I recently attended an excellent alliance training class in Boston by Vantage Partners. I'll be commenting in future blog posts about several of my takeaways from the class and my fellow alliance professionals (40 strong) that attended.

My #1 takeaway? ....

We've Got the Power!

We have more power than we realize. Despite the obstacles and challenges inherent in building alliance capabilities in our organizations, despite all the things we feel we have no control over– we do have significant power in our role as “interventionists” in our organizations.

We can hone our skills as alliance professionals and learn the tools and techniques to manage conflict, negotiate based on interests versus positions, identify and manage differences to maximize mutual value of the alliance. The extent to which we build our own skills in these areas is the extent to which we can lead by showing our organizations a better way to think, a better way to make decisions, a more effective framework for managing conflict and thus, a better way to manage and optimize our alliance relationships. 

People follow competence. We can indeed change our organizations – one stakeholder at a time…

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.

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!