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.
Perhaps the plan that executives were asked to fund did not include all of the key elements for success…
My experience over the past 25 years working with alliances and channels in the technology industry is that there are a number of common gaps in “best practices” and a lack of understanding and skills that prevent revenue from partnerships. These gaps result from narrow “boxed” thinking and lead to failed execution, and missed revenue. I’ve talked about these gaps extensively in previous posts in a series about “The Four “Boxes” that prevent companies from driving revenue from their products and partnerships”.
These “4 boxes” create the classic “chicken and egg” problem. Bus Dev and Alliances teams across the globe believe that they never get the support they need to be successful. And senior executives are hesitant to increase funding and resources, because the plans they’ve funded in the past did not generate measurable revenue.
A new approach is needed and those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that this is the mission of the Andrews Consulting Group:
Helping Technology Companies Unleash the Revenue
Potential of their Partnerships.
To overcome these boxes, you need to “Climb Out of the Box” and leverage a new approach to driving revenue from your alliances and channels.
To get started on this journey, companies can follow the Three Steps to Monetize Your Alliances and Channels below. This week we will talk briefly about these three steps, and over the next few weeks, we will delve into each step in more detail, to help you determine how these approaches could be used to drive revenue from alliances and channels in your company.
The Three Steps to Monetize Your Alliances and Channels:
- Build a Bridge between your products, your alliance partners’ products and your customers
Your customer has the money – and for them to spend money on your products as part of joint solutions with your alliance partners, they need to see the benefits to them. Unfortunately, there are a number of pieces of a successful GTM program that need to be in place to effectively “Build a bridge” that connects to your target customers. These elements include many familiar elements, including joint solution definition, selecting a channel, channel enablement, incentive programs, demand generation and sales engagement – but success depends not just on having a few good assets and programs, but in having a complete approach with all the key elements…
- Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”
Another big challenge in monetizing partnerships is “who” is accountable for driving the “post-deal” and ongoing execution of the GTM program? In many companies the teams that create alliances or sign “deals” with strategic partners are not connected with execution of those agreements. The “hunters” land the deal that supposedly has some revenue potential, but the plan to actually create joint solutions and execute a GTM is hazy – and not clearly owned within the company. For alliances to succeed, there has to be clear ownership and resources dedicated to “farming” (i.e. creating and executing the ongoing GTM plan). It may not be the same person who created the Alliance/deal, but without a post-deal execution team/resources, you can expect revenue from your partnerships to remain elusive…
- Measure the impact of Strategic Alliances on your product revenue
One of the positive changes in the technology industry in recent years has been the increased availability of data about the underlying health of the business and the reliance on that data to make investment decisions. Data-driven-decision making enables business to improve costs, products, sales processes, etc… to get better results with lower costs.
Unfortunately, not all of the parts of the business are at the same level of maturity or have the same “measurability” today. The reality is that Alliances are behind in having credible approaches for measuring revenue impact (unless it is an OEM or Technology reseller deal…)
When we talk about Step 3, I will outline the options available to measure alliance impact on revenue, and talk about some exciting new recent developments and tools that are now being used to measure the pipeline and revenue impact of alliances.
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. I’m also available as a public speaker, to support local and global events in Silicon Valley, or the rest of the flattening world…
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