Collaboration between technology providers and their channel partners has never been more important. Creating a sustainable partnership begins with the customer value proposition. Without customer value, there is no reason to partner! This requires you to get inside the head of the ultimate end user of your products and services and fundamentally understand the motivation to buy. [...]
Because more and more, channels are becoming the preferred route to market for alliances. As a recent CRN article on the VCE alliance illustrates, when alliance managers choose channels they need to understand how they work, what motivates channel partners, what are the economics, and how to deal with channel conflict. With new models of [...]
Channels are under pressure as never before. They have been subject to compressing product margins over the years; first on hardware, then software and now - pressure from a business model perspective in adjusting from transactional payment to recurring revenue driven by the SaaS (software as a service). Forward thinking resellers have been migrating their business [...]
One of the challenges of professional development is retaining the knowledge and incorporating the new learning into the day to day business practice. Most of us intuitively understand the limitations of classroom training. While most well-crafted training includes discussion and practice exercises, it is through immediate use that learning is best retained and the business results are realized. Reinforcement and motivation [...]
Every organization has a unique culture as a result of the norms, values and accepted behaviors that are held within the community. People are often unaware that they do function within a company culture. However, when they begin to work closely with another company culture, they become aware of those differences because of the disconnects [...]
Collaborative competencies are a distinct set of skills that effective alliance professionals have in applying the processes and practices described in the previous blog but collaborative competencies also include many ‘soft skills’. The softskills are ironically the most difficult ones, often gained through on-the-job-training and years of experience. These include being able to assemble virtual, [...]
Alliance management is in many ways a young profession, yet there is a set of defined processes and practices that have been shown to be effective in creating and operating successful collaborations. Research has shown that companies that approach collaboration through ad hoc practices rarely succeed and those that apply a disciplined approach can consistently realize over 80% success rates. [...]
Success Begins at the Top It is hard to overstate the importance of a champion at the senior levels of the organization. Many alliances fail or falter when they lose the executive champion and the role is not back filled with a strong leader. The role of the champion is many fold. They represent the [...]
Partnering and building alliances is the preferred model of business growth for many CEO’s. Collaboration has a multiplier effect; it leverages the expertise, resources, and talent beyond the walls of a single organization. “Collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical” in IBM’s most [...]
No one graduates from school with a degree in Alliance Management and most of us have found ourselves in the profession quite by accident. I’ve asked people how they have come into the profession and there is quite a spectrum. Many come from technical or scientific disciplines when products are created through a collaboration of [...]