3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 1: Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
Part of a Series: Are your Alliances Missing the Money?
- 3 Steps to Monetize Your Strategic Alliances
- Step 1 – Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
- Step 2 – Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”
- Step 3 – Choose the Business Model that Matches How Alliance Solutions are Sold
- Measuring Alliance Impact:
In my most recent post I talked about the barriers that companies face as they try to monetize their “strategic” alliances and the Three Steps to Monetize Your Alliances and Channels. You may notice that I put quotes around “strategic”. I added the quotes because in quite a few companies that I have worked with over the years, “strategic” was viewed as a subtle jab at alliances that did not drive measurable revenue. “Why are we investing in XYZ alliance?”, someone would say. “Oh, we’ve got to invest in ABC they are “strategic”, would be the reply. You can bet that someone in the room was thinking to themselves, “that is bull, we should be investing in XYZ instead…”
I’m not saying that many alliances are not “strategic”, but what I am saying is that because it is often hard to measure alliances impact, companies often do not develop complete GTM programs or execute crisply on alliances – partly because they are not able to see the impact (or lack of impact) on revenue. Without this measuring stick, business loses one of its critical success factors – the ability to course-correct based on results. I will talk about the approaches that can be used to measure alliance revenue impact in a future part of this series.
Today I will focus on Step #1, How to Build a Bridge between your products, your alliance partners’ products and your customers.
We’ve all heard the term “go-to-market” (or GTM), but it is usually used to describe the approach of launching a product. What do you call it when you are trying to launch a joint offering with an alliance partner? (It is like a product launch, only different… ) I call a GTM program for an Alliance, an “Alliance-to-Market” (or ATM) Program.
How to “Build an ATM Bridge” (more…)
Are Your Alliances Missing the Money? 3 Steps to Monetize Your Strategic Alliances (Part 1 of Series)
Part of a Series: Are Your Alliances Missing the Money?
- 3 Steps to Monetize Your Strategic Alliances
- Step 1 – Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
- Step 2 – Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”
- Step 3 – Choose the Business Model that Matches How Alliance Solutions are Sold
- Measuring Alliance Impact:
The Alliances / Bus Development Perspective
It’s a late night after dinner at a company meeting or an industry conference. The alliance and business development staff at your company begin to share war stories and grand ambitions for the next big deal or plan to drive revenue from a strategic alliance. Everyone is excited – and frustrated… Looking back, the vision never quite gets fulfilled. Something always ends up as missing – either the resources to support the deal, the GTM plan to convert opportunity into revenue, or the team just got distracted by “landing the next big fish”…
The Executive Perspective
I recently asked a friend of mine about his experience with monetizing strategic alliances. He is a former top executive at a F100 company with thousands of staff in his business, and the author of a (great) book on leadership. But his views on “Alliances” were jaded by countless bad experiences. “I just don’t trust that Bus Dev and Alliances are going to drive value. Something is always missing,” he lamented. As a result, he rarely found that these groups were priorities for investment, and those grand plans that the Bus Dev and Alliances teams hatched in those late night sessions, never got the resources to give them a chance to succeed. (more…)
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 