Home » Alliances
Category Archives: Alliances
2 Alignment Problems that Destroy the “GTM Bridge” (and limit Revenue)
The challenge appears quite simple – How can a Tech organization set up and run their organization so that they drive revenue from their products and partnerships? But think about your experiences with partnerships – like Bus Dev agreements, with Alliances, and with Indirect Channels (such as resellers and integrators), and I bet you can think of more examples of performance issues than of realized potential. As I’ve talked about in many of my posts, many Tech vendors are set up to market and sell as if they were a direct sales organization – although many, even most, are heavily reliant on their partners to drive revenue.
The root cause seems to be “boxed” strategy and execution that results from organizations pursuing approaches that were developed in a different era, but no longer directly apply to today’s complex IT world of architectures, software-defined data centers and Hybrid Clouds. (more…)
Podcast: Driving Revenue by Bridging the Gap Between Your Alliances and Channels
Listen to the recent podcast – from Steve Andrews
Overview
Over the past couple of years, we have been talking about the challenges for vendors to drive revenue for their products and partnerships, and how many of current practices are based on old business models for selling hardware, then software, and now being misapplied for cloud.
But how can technology vendors change to drive revenue in today’s world?
- The Mission for the Andrews Consulting Group is to “Help Technology Vendors Unleash the Revenue Potential of their Products and Partnerships”
- To accomplish that goal, we’ve developed a new approach to “Climb Out of the Box”™: A New Approach to Drive Revenue for your products and Partnerships
Learn More
What Causes Products and Alliances to Miss Revenue Targets?: Two Common Gaps in the “GTM Bridge”
In a number of my posts this year I’ve talked about the key elements of a GTM program for a product or an alliance in terms of “Building a Bridge” between your products and your customers. The “Bridge” analogy is an apt description because for a product or an alliance to drive revenue, companies need to complete all of the key pieces of the bridge (who wants to go halfway across the bridge and then fall in the abyss below). The Four Key Elements of the GTM Bridge are shown below in Figure 1.
- Solution
- GTM Program
- Field Readiness
- Sales Channel Execution
The question we are looking at in today’s post is where in this process do technology vendors generally have problems? In my experience there are two parts of the GTM Bridge that consistently cause problems and lost revenue in technology vendor GTM programs. These challenges are highlighted by the Red in Figure 1 below.
- Solutions are not clearly defined and messaging does not connect with customer challenges (often “product push”)
- GTM programs are not adopted by field marketing, sales and channels teams (and programs are perceived to be “thrown over the wall”)
Figure 1: The GTM Bridge and Common Gaps in Execution
Measuring Alliance Impact: Have You Moved Beyond the Stone Age of Deal Registration? (3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances 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:
In last week’s post, Measuring the Impact from Your Alliances and Solutions, I talked about the options to measure alliance impact and how most alliances end up with a meet in the channel business model. In another recent post, Choose the Right Model for Your Alliance , I talked about when this model makes sense, and when you should look at other models like OEM and Resale. The challenge with the “meet in the channel” business model is that it is hard to measure since there is not a unique product sku that you can report on in your systems. The key to measuring revenue impact is to tie your alliance solutions to your deal registration system.
Before we talk further about the alliance nuances of deal registration, let’s step back and look at what forces led to the creation of Deal Registration programs, their wide adoption and the value to vendors and their channel partners have evolved. Figure 1 below outlines the drivers and stages of adoption.
Figure 1: The Evolution of Deal Registration
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Options to Measure the Revenue Impact
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 recent blog posts, we’ve been talking about how to drive revenue from strategic alliances. It’s fair to say that for many tech companies, alliances tend to start with great promise but often have underwhelming results in terms of revenue impact. Earlier posts in this series describe the problem and the opportunity and outlined 3 key steps to take to assure that your alliances drive measurable revenue. As we discussed in last week’s post, most alliances are not well-suited to an OEM or resall business model and a better option is a soft bundle sale with a GTM model that is often called “meet in the channel”.
But how do you measure revenue impact for soft bundle through channels?
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 3 – Choose the Right Business Model to Drive Revenue Impact
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 the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about how companies can drive revenue from their strategic alliances and answering the question, Are your alliances missing the money? Below are 3 steps that companies can take to drive revenue. In talking to companies over the years, I’ve found that many (most?) companies are not able to measure revenue impact from most of their alliances. In today’s high tech industry, if you can’t measure it, it does not exist – and the resources to execute will also not exist…
Figure 1 below depicts this challenge visually. As discussed in Step 1: Building the Bridge, you need to have a complete set of programs to get to the customer – AND you need to have a closed loop feedback mechanism to measure your success (in terms of pipeline and revenue).
Figure 1: Measuring Alliance Impact – Across the ATM Bridge
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 2 – Set up your Organization to both “Hunt” and “Farm”
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 alliances. I defined 3 Steps to Monetize these alliances and focused on Step 1: Build a Bridge between you and your alliance partners’ customers”. In this week’s post, I will focus on how to execute Step 2: Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”.
“Hunting” and “Farming” are common analogies in the tech industry (particularly in the US) to describe different types of sales roles, and they apply to tech industry alliances roles as well. In the tech industry: (more…)
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…)
Leadership? Management? Neither? “What’s in your Company’s Wallet?”
One of the most interesting elements of being a consultant is observing the differences (and similarities) between how different companies handle a particular challenge. To get this visibility, you don’t always have to work directly with a company – often this visibility comes from networking and business development discussions about “what is working”, and “what is not” with colleagues, or more formal forums like a “Partner Advisory Council (PAC).
One area that I find is challenging for many companies in the tech industry is the dynamic of “Leadership vs. Management”. For both small and large tech companies, leadership and management are required, but the needs vary quite dramatically and I’ve often seen companies that are short one or both of these types of DNA. Table 1 below shows accepted definitions of these terms. (more…)
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 