Articles About Better Partnering
Ten Best Practices for Better Deal Registration
Deal registration is a common element of most channel programs. However, without a solid PRM system behind it, the process can be cumbersome and ultimately fail. The purpose of deal registration is to reduce channel conflict by protecting partner deals. It prevents partners from stealing deals and competing with the direct sales force. It enables vendors to focus their [...]
Why aren’t your Channel Partners using their MDF Funds?
We are pleased to announce our partnership with Requisite Software, an industry-leading Channel Management, B2B eCommerce and Master Data Management solutions. Together we plan to provide a series of postings highlighting issues and soutions for the partner management community. This is the first in the series. If there is one consistent trend in MDF, it's that partners rarely use all [...]
Allies in the War for your Attention
Great meeting last night: Changing the Game: The Age of the Platform Meets the 24-hour Customer produced by the California Chapter of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals. The event, hosted by Cisco Systems, featured two new authors of two game changing books. Phil Simon spoke about how the Gang of Four - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google redefined [...]
Alliance Stakeholder Alignment
Do you have champions in your alliance? or do you have snipers and hostages? When I teach alliance skills mastery workshops, I often ask how much time managers spend on internal alignment. That is winning the hearts and minds of the internal alliance stakeholders to gain their buy-in and cooperation. I hear answers from 30% to sometimes a frustrated [...]
A Perfect Storm for Alliances
Non-traditional partners to pursue innovative opportunties I was asked to moderate this year's Alliance Executive Roundtable for the California Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals around the topic Cross-Sector Innovation and the Role of Alliances. Twenty-four senior alliance executives attended representing the who's who in technology: Capgemini, Cisco, Emerson, eMeter, Google, HP, IBM, IDC, Intel, Marketo, NetSuite, Novell, Oracle, PWC, [...]
Cracking the Code on Alliance Performance
Alliance Management Practices: Performers and Underperformers All business managers, not just those managing alliances, have been challenged with navigating a stormy economy. We had to make decisions on where to cut back, how to to make the best of diminished resources, and still achieve targeted business outcomes. 2010 may show some glimmers of recovery but the outlook is still [...]
Dashboards Capture Voice of the Partner
This Blog Contributed by Monica David, Vice President, North America, CustomerImpact What are the critical components in assessing the success of Partner Programs? Clearly, it means putting the Voice of the Partner to work. Successful partner programs need significant investments in technology, products, processes, and people. The goal is to maximize the return on these investments. By collecting and [...]
Culture of Collaboration
Is your company partner friendly? Or is every attempt at collaboration an uphill battle? I heard one partner manager describe her partnership with one company as “hand-to-hand combat.” Another partner manager described his partner as “infested with partnering antibodies,” -- not surprisingly this was from the life sciences sector. On the other hand, some companies stand out as “partners [...]
Building Sustainable Partner Value Propositions, Part 2
In my last post, I talked about the "value triangle," and how it creates win-win-win value propositions for you, your partners, and customers. Today, I'll flesh out what I mean by solution, financial, and sales and marketing value, as well as present a case example of how a global systems integrator applied the principles of this "value triangle." _______________________________________________________________________ [...]
Building Sustainable Value Propositions
Building Win‐Win‐Win Value Propositions: The Key to Sustainable Partnerships by Norma Watenpaugh, Principal, PhoenixCG How often do partner managers or management focus only on, “What do we get out of the deal?” While it is important as good business managers that we understand the return on investment on our partnerships and alliances, it is also important to understand that [...]
Navigating Stakeholder Alignment
Aligning team members and stakeholders to support the work of an alliance or any business relationship can be surprisingly treacherous. One would think that if the strategic intent and return on investment on an alliance is clear the rest falls into place. Well, guess again. At PhoenixCG we look at team alignment in two dimensions: 1) are individuals committed [...]
Collaboration Philosophy
Launching new website turned out to be much more of an involved exercise than I imagined. In this day and age, the website is the face of the company and so a new website caused us to rethink the business, the practice areas, and the positioning of PhoenixCG for the future. Since the founding of the company and the [...]
The Nature of Trust
I did a study three years ago of partner health across 14 strategic alliances and about ~400 respondents and found something very interesting about the nature of trust in alliances. We did a correlation of heath attributes against overall partner health. We found that when 'trust' was present it did not score very high in importance. When trust was [...]
Creating Value from Innovation and the Role of Alliances
Innovation takes many forms. We often focus on innovation as technological breakthroughs and indeed those are important to fuel corporate growth. But there are other forms of innovation which can be just as powerful and just as disruptive to the status quo in creating strategic competitive advantage. Innovation in operations, in business processes and in business models can have [...]
Collaborative Capability
Certification assures Collaborative Capability: Taking Partnering to the Next Level I was fortunate to be featured in an interview for the Marketing Thought Leadership series with Linda Popky, Marketing Master and recently named one of Silicon Valley's Top 100 Women of Influence. In this podcast interview, I was asked to speak about the growing recognition of collaboration as a [...]
Social Media at Your Service
One area in which social media is gaining traction is support services.When you combine partners in an interactive forum they become a self-help community.When you add customers to the mix, your partners become very competitive in demonstrating their expertise to the customer base.The result is very organic but very effective way of providing support services. Lithium, a social networking [...]
Managing Communities and Ecosystems with Social Media
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009 Social media is gaining presence within partner ecosystems These are natural communities and naturally lend themselves to these media.There has been a trend for some time by large vendor companies to position themselves as the hub in a vendor-centric partner ecosystem. Most have built partner directories on their [...]
Is Social Media Crossing the Chasm in Partner Management?
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009Well, arguably yes and no. Some technologies that might be labeled early Web 2.0 were in pretty widespread usage. Others such as Twitter are caught up in the tornado. Some, such as MySpace, already seem to be in decline. Blogs, wikis, and web meeting technology are plausibly across the [...]