AKA Why Do Companies Struggle to Build the ATM Bridge? The Ownership and Task Boxes (Part 4 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
The last few weeks, I have been talking about why companies struggle to connect their products and alliance to their sales channels to drive revenue. In this week’s post, I will talk about two of the Four Boxes shown in Figure 1, the Ownership and Task Boxes.
Figure 1: The Four Boxes
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1. The Product Box – (January 28th post)
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 – (Feb 11th post) |
The Ownership Box
One of the key challenges in an Alliance GTM is the number of different functional groups that must work together to agree on strategy and orchestrate execution. In many organizations, there are two separate processes that must “meet in the middle”, resulting in a challenge I call “the Ownership Box”. Figure 2 shows how the Ownership Box works. On the left side of the model, the Product team engages the Alliance organization to develop relationships and integrations that constitute a “whole product” for customers. On the right side of the model, the Sales team asks the Marketing team to integrate the alliance solution into the company sales process. For many companies, Alliances and Channel Marketing are tasked with bringing the GTM together, in the middle.
Figure 2: The Ownership Box and the “DNA Gap”
The challenge is that the two sides of the organization have different visions for what an alliance means and the type of work that is needed to make it valuable to the company. I call this difference the “DNA Gap”. The Product and Alliances teams tend to think about creating and validating detailed technical solutions and negotiating custom relationships with each alliance.. The Marketing and Sales organizations want to scale an approach across multiple alliances and to make it simple for sales, so they incorporate alliances into their standard programs. Both of these worldviews are critical for organization success, but what you I find is that – since the Alliance and Channel cultures are so different, very few people in the company can “bridge the gap” and relate to the people and the deliverables from the two sides of the organization.
Companies rely on functional teaming to overcome this challenge, but this does not work well when the team does not have a clear vision of the outcome and how to get there (i.e. what tasks to complete). This brings us to a separate but related challenge that I call “The Task Box”, shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: The Task Box
The tasks involved with creating and driving revenue through an “indirect” channel are more complex that the steps to building a direct sales GTM. Companies need to recruit, onboard and enable a channel, there needs to be a strong value proposition for the partners to invest, and field engagement need to be set up so that the organization can develop opportunities, position and close those sales opportunities, working with the channel.
To assure that partners will invest in supporting this process, tech vendors create a channel partner program with benefits and requirements that are essentially the “carrot and the stick” to encourage partners to make the investments and develop skills that will lead to revenue. If the challenge was just the “Task Box”, organizations could probably make it work, but combined with the challenges of “The Ownership Box”, many organizations end up in raw execution mode – with no clear channel strategy framework for what needs to be done, and a wishy-washy matrix of ownership that muffles the ability to execute. Both of these “boxes” lead to ineffective sales engagement, and missed revenue opportunities….
The Ownership and Task Boxes are significant barriers to driving revenue, even within one company. When two different companies try to collaborate on an Alliance GTM, you often get a clash of cultures, with each company trying to make the messaging reflect their product messages and the GTM to fit into their set of standard practices – but that is a topic to cover in future post…
Next week, we’ll wrap up this “Four Boxes” series with the “The Solution Branding Box”. I welcome any comments below — And make sure you “Follow” our blog (look for the “Follow” link on the upper left) and have your say.
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 