Why do Companies Struggle to Build the Alliance GTM Bridge? The “Four Boxes” (Part 1 of 5)

• Part 1: The Four Boxes
• Part 2: Are You “Executing Out of the Box”?  A Checklist
• Part 3: The Product Box
• Part 4: The Ownership and Task Boxes
• Part 5: The Solution-Branding Box

Part 1: The Four Boxes

In a recent blog I talked about how to “Build a Bridge” to connect you and your alliances to your target market.  I call this Bridge an Alliance-to-Market (ATM) Program, and it is pictured below in Figure 1.  It looks pretty easy doesn’t it?  Four simple steps and voila, revenue comes shooting out of your sales channels!  But that does not match the experience that most of us have had in the industry.

Figure 1: Building a Bridge

Think back to the Sales leaders that you’ve seen in your career – how many of them really felt comfortable letting go of the sale and trusting an indirect channel, and an indirect process, to determine their fate.  How many times have you seen a field team aggressively sell another vendor’s products (and how long did that last)?  How many times have you seen a “meet-in-the-channel” program really click (and were you able to measure revenue impact)?  Setting up an ATM program to drive revenue requires a focused effort to make the GTM repeatable, and that can be difficult for many companies. The grim reality is that most ATM Programs are not successful.  Why is that?  My experience is that they are rarely successful because they are built based on a set of “boxed”, siloed, band-aid, one-size-fits-all approaches that don’t connect products to sales channels, or to the problems that potential customers are trying to solve. These approaches were originally developed by technology vendors to make a “product sale” through their direct sales team and their hardware-focused channel.  When companies try to extend these “best practices” to selling joint solutions with alliance partners and their channel in a virtualized, software-defined, hybrid-cloud world, something does not work… (because they are thinking and executing “inside the box”).

Figure 2: The Four Boxes

1. The Product Box – technology companies want to sell products and customers want to solve problems… 2. The Ownership Box – Building the Bridge cuts across many organizations.  Who is accountable for driving the overall program?… 3. The Task Box – Creating and executing an ATM has a lot of tasks.  What needs to be done and when, to drive sales success (and do you have the Operations and Infrastructure in place to support your plan?)… 4. The Solution-Branding Box – You build sales tools, training and campaigns around your products.  But your channel needs materials on the solution (which includes other products, plus services) that they can insert into their sales process…

In the coming weeks, I will talk about each of these “boxes” in more detail and provide insights on approaches that technology companies can use to “Climb Out of the Box” to drive revenue from their products and alliances. I welcome any comments below — And make sure you subscribe to our blog (and tell your friends), so you can follow this discussion and have your say.

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