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?

Go Ugly Early!

I was speaking to a colleague today and we were comparing notes on the difficulty some alliance managers have in asking the tougher questions in the qualification process. I told him that a sales executive I worked with long ago told me something that has stuck with me ever since.

He told me that the best thing you can do in these situations is to "go ugly early". He told me that he always wants to know what the show stoppers are in month 1 of discussions, vs. month 9.

I told my colleague this story and he laughed. He said that he believed that this was exactly the right perspective. If you're having discussions with a partner about joint development, don't you want to know their position on IP, pretty early in the discussion? It's amazing to me that some alliance folks will say - "oh, I don't want to bring that up now, I might scare them off". I think that's the completely wrong approach. You should be thinking, I want to find out their position (and tell them mine) early, because if we're far apart, I need to know that now.

Being afraid to have a tough conversation, doesn't make the need for the discussion disappear. All you're doing then is kicking the can up the road, only to have to deal with it later, when both parties have invested a lot of time, and perhaps also reinforced some bad assumptions.

Now that's ugly!

Cynicism is not Leadership!

Why is it that often the hopes, dreams and goals that accompany a new year, give way to cynicism before Valentine's Day?

Somehow we sometimes get so beaten down by the status quo, that we think it's "naive" to hope for something more. So we fall into the old patterns of cynicism. "That's the way it's always been around here". "They'll never accept my new idea". "Things will never change".

Well this thinking might be safe, and it's sure a nice place to hide, but it's not leadership.

As alliance managers our job is to lead. To believe that change is possible, that better is possible. I'm not talking about being blind to the realities and challenges of the current environment. I'm talking about being fully cognizant of the obstacles and challenges before you, but deciding that you are going to try to make a difference anyway.

As we attack our alliance plans and strategies for 2011, let's resolve to lead.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! With the New Year comes reflection on 2010 and thoughts about how to improve in 2011.

I had the pleasure today of hearing Debbie Yow deliver a keynote address at a professional women's luncheon. Debbie is the Athletic Director at NC State University, one of only three female ADs in the nation. She's an impressive professional and a pioneer in her field. She delivered an inspiring talk today.

Her words were about success. She laid out a 3 step gameplan, that I believe is particularly prescriptive (and timely) for evaluating alliance relationships.

1. Assess the current state. Honestly and accurately evaluate where you are now.
2. Set the right goals for the right reasons.
3. Guage progress.

She also outlined what she coined "dream killers"

• Tradition. "I honor the past, but I don't want to live there."
• Fear.
• Stereotypes.
• Complacency.
• Fatigue.
• Short term thinking.
• Ineffective communication.
• Lack of vision.

As you evaluate your alliance organization and partnerships, her words would be good to keep in mind...

What's in it for me? WIFM

There was a recent question posted on an alliances discussion board asking how do you get sales teams in your key partnerships to work in harmony?

This is a question worth asking, since in my experience, this is where alliances most often fall down. The only way to validate your joint selling proposition is to sell your first customer, and the only way to get to the customer is to get your two sales teams collaborating.

How?

Fundamentally you have to address "WIFM" (what's in it for me?) for each sales team. Will selling with this partner get me access to decision-makers? Increase my deal size? Facilitate upsell/cross sell? Will I make money through and be rewarded for collaboration? The tops down "you will sell it cuz management says so" only gets you passive aggressive compliance. There must be something in it for the sales guy or gal, and that something is usually money, but could also be prestige, props, career leverage, etc. 

Identifying the WIFM for each sales organization, developing a clear sales engagement process, and focusing on both as a central part of your alliance strategy is critical if you want to get sales traction. As we used to say at IBM - nothing happens until you sell something!

The Truth and Track Shoes



I had a recent conversation with a Global Alliance Manager who manages our partnership with a company that happens to be both our biggest partner and our biggest competitor. You can imagine what her days are like.

She told me that a story had been circulating that this partner "poached" one of our people and for this reason, one of our country managers had issued a "cease and desist" order to his team to "stop all strategic work" with this partner.

Of course, this edict was issued pre-fact finding mission. Turns out that the employee had posted for the job. There was no poaching. Oh, and that we'd recently hired 5 folks in this country from this partner, so apparently we'd been doing some "poaching" of our own. Oops. Never mind. Literally a lie traveled around the world before the truth got its track shoes on.

It occurs to me that when we talk about managing co-opetition, mostly we talk about operational considerations (ensuring we have proper firewalls, managing and protecting IP, etc. etc.)..

Seems to me that the biggest hurdle, and the thing that requires the most vigilant focus, is managing the rumor mill, lowering the emotional temperature by applying liberal doses of fact and overall paranoia management. Now that is a full time job.

Are you a "Straight A" student?

I attended a recent webinar hosted by Vantage Partners entitled "Managing Difficult Alliance Conversations".

Stu Kliman was the speaker and he encouraged alliance managers to move from "positional bargaining", where the role of the alliance manager is to claim maximum value from a fixed pie - to "joint problem solving", where the role of the alliance manager is to work together to create and distribute value.

Sound good in theory, why is this so difficult to do in practice?

The ladder of inference
Stu talked about the concept of "partisan perceptions". We each form perceptions based on the data we access (or that we choose to filter). Imagine you have a ladder and you sit it in a pool of data. You then "move up the ladder" by forming conclusions and a point of view based on where you placed your ladder. Imagine that your partner is doing the same thing. Two parties, two different ladders, two different perspectives on the seemingly same situation.

Psychological studies have shown that we each have an operating principle that partisan perceptions exist in "other people", but not in us!

Alliance management is all about managing differences and these differences contribute greatly to partisan perceptions. For example, you partner with a company that that has complementary skills or products. Because of differences in your cultures and business models, they see you as slow and bureaucratic, you see them as arrogant and imprudent. Partisan differences abound.

The best way to break this logjam is to make sure that you are striking a balance between advocacy and intimacy in your alliance conversations.

Advocacy vs. intimacy
Advocacy involves advocating for your position. It's a completely self-centered perspective. Intimacy involves "learning through dialog" - assuming that you are not in possession of all the facts, and engaging in an open conversation with your partner to understand their perspective.

Learning through dialog requires an authentic, genuine curiosity to understand the partner's ladder of inference. You have to climb down from your ladder, see where your partner has planted his ladder, and climb up his ladder of inference to truly understand things from his perspective.

Stu invited us to think about our last difficult alliance conversation and then to "script" the conversation by writing down the dialog (what we said, what they said). He asked us to put an "A" next to statements that we made that were all about advocacy and an "I" next to statements that were about intimacy. Not surprisingly most of us had a lot of "A's" on our paper!

Don't be a "Straight A" student!
When parties get stuck in alliance discussions, it's usually because they were "straight A students" solely focused on advocacy!

Next time you have to have a difficult alliance conversation, make sure you "check your ladder". This is one of the few times in your life when you want to avoid being a straight A student.

Stu indicated that the recording of the webinar should be on their website shortly. You can check for it on Vantage Partner's website.