Event Rewind: ASAP Summit

During the last week of March, I had the pleasure of attending the ASAP Summit in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Heading into the conference — I had quite high expectations — given the lineup of industry leading professionals covering topics like: leveraging alliance business strategy to create predictable and repeatable revenue models, the good and the bad of partner behavior, and the initial onboarding experience of a partner.

The takeaways from my journey are vast and cannot be summed up in a single blog post, so I’ll highlight just a few here.

Alliances are the lifeblood of a strategic go-to-market execution in today’s world of digital transformation, migration to the cloud, and IoT. Simply put, you can’t run a successful business without creating an ecosystem of partners to drive revenue.

In the enterprise space, you’re constantly reminded to not only see the value to your business, but the value to your customers. It’s difficult to bundle up a bunch of tools and package them up for a client all on your own. Enterprises are very complex. Instead, you need to go to market with SI’s in order to properly satisfy the needs of your customers. On top of that, you have to work with your ISV and hardware partners to fill gaps where your existing product offering might need a boost. Today’s enterprise clients will no longer stand for buying disparate systems that fail to work with one another and lack the ability to scale globally. For this exact reason, you have to go to market with your partners.

Despite the fact that alliances are the lifeblood of a strategic go-to-market execution, they are underserved.

I spoke with a gentleman at the ASAP Summit who was a responsible for a 3 billion dollar revenue stream and only had 4 team members working with him. …Wait, did you hear that right? Yes, yes you did. It’s truly incredible to me the overall lack of support that alliance professionals face today. Not only is it a lack of human resources — it’s a lack of systems they have at their disposal.

95% of the attendees I spoke with manage their strategic go-to-market partners with spreadsheets, emails, Google Docs, SharePoint sites, and other manual tools to coordinate billion dollar revenue streams within their business. All these alliance professionals are borrowing tools from their other internal teams — like CRM from sales, or marketing automation from…well…marketing. These disparate systems might have worked 20 years ago when alliances weren’t responsible for more than 30% of revenue, but today’s market demands alliances automation!

Overall, the ASAP Summit exceeded my high expectations and allowed me to walk away with a whole new sense of fulfillment. Working for a company like WorkSpan gives me much pride. What we’re doing is truly transformative — giving alliances the automation they so desperately need. We’re helping them be the strategic and tactical people they are, proving their alliances are healthy and driving revenue.