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

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!

Best Practice Makes Perfect?

There was a recent thread on the ASAP (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals) LinkedIn group about best practices. Here are my thoughts on "best practices in applying best practices"!

• Tailor to the culture of your company. Company culture provides the "current" for implementing best practices. What works at one company, may not work at yours and vice versa. Be sure to think about cultural dynamics when applying best practices and adjust accordingly.
• Use your tailored best practices to develop your alliances playbook. You need some kind of consistent framework for qualifying, developing and executing partner initiatives. The playbook defines how you "get alliances work done around here".
• Combine your best practices playbook with professional development. A great playbook in the hands of unskilled alliance managers will not get you very far. Build a training and professional development plan for the alliances team to help them to understand why these are best practices and how to apply them.
• Build in flexibility. Once size does not fit all alliances. Mike Leonetti, Chairman Emeritus of ASAP, used to say "when you've seen one alliance, you've seen one alliance". 
• Align measurement and comp. Beware the law of unintended consequences. Make sure that your teams are properly incented and that you are measuring what you expect. 

What say you?