Building a Bridge to Drive Revenue From Your Alliances and Channels (Part 2 of 2)

AKA Building a Bridge to Connect You and Your Alliance Partners to Your Target Audience

• Part 1: The Alliance GTM Challenge
• Part 2: Building a Bridge

Part 2: Building a Bridge

To connect with customers and drive revenue, technology vendors need to “Build a Bridge” from customers back to themselves. This bridge establishes customer value to create pull, and also establishes a context to establish a repeatable process (or road) that allows vendors to deliver their marketing and sales message, and for customers to buy the vendor’s products.

But how do you build this bridge?  When you build a suspension bridge, you build from the outside-in.  The builders determine where they want to connect to land (the anchors), they pour the concrete foundation for the towers that will bear the load of the bridge and, and then they are finally able to build the deck that will support the road that runs on over the bridge.  The road is what the builders really wanted, since the road makes it easy to move traffic and goods from one place to another.

Figure 1: Components of a Suspension Bridge

Building a Bridge for an Alliance GTM operates in the same way.  (Hint: start at the customer and work “outside-in”)

Step 1: The Anchors (Focus Products and Target Customers)

As shown in Figure 2, The Alliance GTM Bridge connects Focus Products and Target Customers. At the beginning of an alliance GTM discussion, companies start with a notion of what products they want to connect, and what customers they want to reach. Perhaps the alliance partners decide the focus products are storage hardware in combination with de-duplication software that addresses some customer challenges when deploying virtual desktops (VDI) for mid-market customers.  That decision would then focus the GTM Program to achieve this goal.

Figure 2: Building an Alliance-to-Market (ATM) Bridge

Step 2: The Foundation (Solution and Sales Channel)

In building an Alliance GTM Bridge the tower foundations are the Solution definition and the Sales Channel that you will need to bring that Solution to customers.  To make these choices, technology vendors need to think through how their products fit together to solve customer problems, and what the sales process will need to be to drive successful sales.  For example, in the mid-market VDI example, what are the elements of the “whole product” that customers need to address this challenge, and where do your offerings fit into how customers buy?  If you think of the whole product as the “car”, are you the engine, the tires or the steering wheel of that car?   Is it a transactional add-on to the sale, or something that will need to be architected and supported with professional services?  All of these variables (and quite a few more) define what Solution you are bringing to market and the Sales Channel you will need to use to be successful.

Of course, once you have defined your solution, you will also need to develop value-oriented messaging for marketing and selling the solution. This messaging may very well be different than your product messaging, and your alliance partners’ product messaging.  But that is a topic for another blog…

Step 3: The Road Over the Bridge (GTM Program and Field Readiness)

In an Alliance GTM, the GTM program is the road that the technology vendors wants to ride on to drive sales.  A GTM Program consists of elements like sales tools, internal and partner training, and demand generation campaigns – all supported by assets aimed at creating sales opportunities for a specific solution through a specific sales channel.

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