Unlocking the Exponential Value of Your Strategic Partners
Your Strategic Partnerships are at Risk
I hate to break it to you, your strategic partnerships were only set up to be adequate at best and are at risk of failing. In fact, most will fail this year in delivering the joint business plan that you painstakingly put together.
As new technologies (cloud, security, IOT, AI/ML, big data, converged systems) and customer preferences (e.g. snacking instead of formal sit down dinners) force realignment of the ecosystem (e.g. emergence of managed service providers in high tech and quick service retailers like Pieology in food retailing), inability to partner well will result in lost opportunities and even worse — disruption of your existing business model.
Whether you’re a hardware provider acting on the dual challenges of convergence and cloud or a consumer beverages company responding to the fast emerging quick service retailer channel — you know that those that orchestrate their ecosystems to deliver a better customer solution and experience will win. Those that unlock the exponential value of their partners will disrupt markets and drive faster adoption.
The Problem with Strategic Alliances and Partnerships Today
The problem isn’t you. The problem is that your hands are tied when it comes to generating massive growth with your strategic partners. The tools that you rely on to manage channel partners such as resellers weren’t designed to help you manage the modern n-way strategic partnerships. They were created to help you automate repeatable activities, push out one-way communications, and pre-baked marketing campaigns.
For your strategic top-tier partners, you’ve hired alliance leaders to build relationships, to run marketing programs, and to generate sales growth. But what solutions do they have at their disposal? They’re left relying on emails, shared spreadsheets, conference calls, and quarterly briefings to set goals, build alignment, create and manage marketing campaigns that will drive up to 80% of your total partner generated sales. What happens when there’s churn on your team, or on your partner’s team? It’s common for initiatives to be delayed by up to 90 days as new people are brought up to speed. Can you afford to lose 90 days?
Even when your collective teams start executing to the plan. What’s really going on? Do the weekly email updates or bi-weekly conference calls give you insight into all the activities, blockers, and results? When the CMO asks you how a campaign is performing, what activities have taken place, what the results of those activities are, is your first reaction to say, “I’ll get back to you” and then send an email to your partner counterpart?
When it’s the end of the quarter, are you anxious when you see the finance and operations team walking around. You know that they’ll ask you if your budget will be fully spent. Of course it’ll be fully spent, but will those returned joint marketing dollars go towards funding a strategic marketing campaign that aligns with your goals? Or will it go towards funding year-long zombie campaigns and miscellaneous schwag so next year’s budget doesn’t get cut? You’re not alone, up to 40% of joint marketing dollars are underutilized near the end of the quarter. Think of how much marketing value is being wasted because you and your partners don’t have any specific campaigns ready to be funded and launched.
The Old Ways Won’t Get You There
Some of these challenges might be familiar. And you’ve probably already created a plan to address them by adding more headcount, increasing the quantity and levels of communication, or maybe even building a results dashboard that can be shared with one click. Unfortunately those solutions won’t solve all your problems, and they don’t systematically enable shared system for people, process, data and insights needed to sustain and grow strategic partnerships.
Adding more headcount on your team will only create a bottleneck on your partner’s side and not bring additional partner engagement to your portal island. Multiple studies have shown that productivity and engagement decreases with the number of emails sent or conference calls held. Forcing strategic partners to learn your specific processes alienates them and makes you harder to work with. One-off dashboards are glorified spreadsheets, and without a shared security and access model, will cause more problems than solutions.
You Need a Network Based Model
Instead of pleading for an additional headcount, extending a PRM portal project from your channel side to the strategic partners side, or hiring a consultant to build a dashboard for your excel sheet; join SAP, Intel, Infosys, Centurylink and other 60 other global enterprises on the WorkSpan Marketing Network.
Build your campaigns in WorkSpan (our concierge service will gladly create your existing campaigns in WorkSpan for you). And invite your partners to join you in building and running your campaigns. You won’t need an additional headcount, a full-time administrator, or days of exhaustive training.
How Do I Implement and Get Value from a Network Model?
The Network Model is designed to deliver value in 5 phases as you join and progressively build on your network and campaigns.
Phase 1 — Visibility
By bringing your strategic partner campaign spreadsheet onto WorkSpan (our Concierge does that for free) and then building/sharing your relevant campaigns on WorkSpan, you’re increasing the trust and alignment between you and your strategic partners. Every time you or your partner log into WorkSpan, you both have visibility to all your shared campaigns and programs. You can see which campaigns are running where and by whom and all gaps are visible in a shared calendar.
Phase 2 — Accountability
Next, focus on ensuring all campaigns and programs have goals and metrics. This ensures you can judge effectiveness of each campaign and each partner by the same yardstick aligned with your shared goals. First results can be added manually, then by integrating the results of your and your partner’s CRM, marketing automation, online advertising, and other marketing systems, you’re not just getting real-time results, but also fostering honesty and accountability. For your partners, proof of execution submissions weeks after a campaign has ended will be a thing of the past. Campaign post mortem surprises and regrets will also be history.
Phase 3 — Velocity
Having the ability to view results as they come in, you’ll be able to make better and faster decisions. You’ll be able to quickly expand high-performing campaigns by allocating more budget, while reducing budget from low-performing or delayed campaigns. The velocity of your partner marketing campaigns will accelerate to meet all new market demands. Build. Join. Run. Repeat.
Phase 4 — Scalability
Unlock the strength of your ecosystem by building campaigns on WorkSpan and making them discoverable to your trusted partners. Utilize their teams, their expertise, and even their funds. You’ll be fostering a sense of reciprocity, but what you’re achieving is scalability. Just because it’s your idea doesn’t mean you need to do all the work.
Phase 5 — Strengthening Your Network
You’ll be amazed that you can orchestrate the breadth of your network and multitude of campaigns without losing oversight. By empowering your network to share insights, improve processes, you’ll strengthen and deepen the bonds between your team and your partners’. The circle of trust will grow and become specific to your GTM — by industry, by audience, by region, by solution.
With improved campaign allocation, visibility into more campaigns that can be funded, and timely results; the flywheel of your partner marketing program begins to spin more rapidly. You’ll be able to show exponential results versus incremental gains.
This way your ecosystem, truly becomes a place where people gather, shared processes get done, data and insights empower your decisions. It is a living breathing system. In subsequent blogs we will explore each one of the phases in depth along with successful customer examples.
