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”
To connect with customers and drive revenue, technology vendors need to “Build a Bridge” from customers back to themselves (at the near end of the bridge). 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? Figure 1, below, shows how a suspension bridge is built. 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 is important; because once you build the road, automobiles and trucks you can use it over and over to get to their destination.
Figure 1: Components of a Suspension Bridge
Figure 2 shows the approach for building an Alliance to Market (ATM) Bridge. Building a Bridge for an Alliance GTM operates in the same way. (Hint: start at the customer J and work “outside-in”)
Figure 2: Building an Alliance-to-Market (ATM) Bridge
Step 1a: The Anchors (Focus Products and Target Customers)
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.
Step 1b: 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 1c: The Road Over the Bridge (GTM Program and Field Readiness)
An Alliance GTM (ATM program) is the road that the technology vendors build to connect the alliance offerings to their customers to drive repeatable sales. An ATM 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 – but I’ve often seen big gaps when the program is put together. I’ll talk more about what requirements for a strong GTM program in a future post
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