EnterpriseLevelPartneringWHITE PAPER

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PARTNERING CHALLENGESThe unprecedented degree of market fluctuation, over the last few years, has our leaders in the board rooms exerting extra pressure to bring in results to meet expectations. All market players are facing softening demand, therefore everyone will be fighting harder for the attention and commitment of partners and customers. In a shrinking pool of opportunity, avoiding the inevitable conflicts across multiple routes to market is bound to be a drag on resources.

Enterprise Level Partnering

INTRODUCTIONIt’s hard enough to make sure your own sales organization is speaking with one consistent voice, so when you add major partners to the mix the challenge becomes even tougher. When partnering, how do you make sure you’re both truly aligned, how do you plan your growth strategy, and how should you set up the joint rules of engagement so you’re selling through or with them, but not driving up your costs by selling for them? This White Paper will point out to you where the challenges lie in partnering successfully. You’ll get fresh insight into the partnership value chain and learn the activities you should be executing as part of a proven partnering process.

As with any of our White Papers, there will be a big variance in the seniority and experience of the readership. Some of you will perhaps be in your first managerial role, looking to focus on what’s really important in the deal. Others may be more seasoned sales leaders at Director, Managing Partner, or VP

level tuning in to make sure you’re in step with the latest thinking and technologies. This White Paper aims to provide something for the complete range of requirements, since the ideas and recommendations have applicability right up the leadership hierarchy. However, if you want to dig deeper or move wider, we urge you to get in touch with us individually. You can do this via email to: info@thetasgroup.com.

This White Paper will cover 3 key areas. We’ll start by analyzing why partner alignment is so difficult, especially now. We’ll then outline the good things that happen when you get the alignment and strategy execution right. For this, we’ll take the perspectives of the stakeholders. After that, we’ll cover how you execute correctly by breaking down the challenges into their component parts and address the process for both your enterprise and/or your portfolio of mid-tier partners. We’ll conclude by summarizing the benefits that we’ve covered.

PartneringStrategy

MultipleRoutes to

Market

ShorterProduct Life

Cycles

Complex,CompleteSolutions

Customer’sUse of Technology

as a StategicWeapon

AggressiveGrowth

BoardRoom / Wall

Street

AggressiveCompetition

DigitalEconomy

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BENEFITS OF CHANNEL ALIGNMENTObviously, different stakeholders view their benefits from different perspectives.

At the C-level, the benefit is leveraging the channel to accelerate time-to-market, drive profit, and customer satisfaction. This group of stakeholders is looking to a well-oiled machine to deliver on the expectations derived from the growth strategy:

• Customer / partner retention and loyalty • Consistency of the brand and value experience • Acceleration of strategy execution

At the VP-level, the focus is on growing revenue (through the channel):

• Grow channel revenue, reduce costs, and increase profits

• Consistent, reliable, and predictable customer interaction from channel partners

• Manage the joint pipeline to enhanced partner performance

For channel marketing, increasing brand and market awareness will be important:

• Consistent product knowledge and marketing collateral

• Joint demand generation events, campaigns, plans • Return of effort on MDF investment and marketing

activities

And finally for customer and partner service, it will be about increasing satisfaction:

• Secure the best response to service requirements• Securing the service experience to build loyalty • Customer and partner satisfaction

The brew of pressures is sufficiently potent to ensure a significant challenge within one’s own company in securing alignment and focus. If we also consider the perspective of our partners, the task of generating mutual alignment and focus required to meet our objectives becomes a Herculean one.

We should be conducting our planning efforts to answer the following questions from an operational perspective:

• How will we protect our current revenue streams?• What incremental opportunities can we identify and

pursue?• How will we ensure that we consistently meet

expectations in this very unpredictable environment?

From a strategy execution perspective, the question becomes, “how do we acquire, deploy, and enhance the organizational and individual competencies to grow the competitive advantage of the company in partnering to consistently meet our targets?”

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• How: Our ability to integrate our respective company value chains into a joint virtual value chain, which will connect the offerings that we want to bring to our target customers. This part constitutes the hub for operational execution of the strategy

How well the “how” is executed ultimately determines the answers to three questions we started out with:

• How will we protect our current revenue streams?

• What incremental opportunities can we identify and pursue?

• How will we ensure we consistently meet expectations in a very unpredictable environment?

This, of course, brings us back to the command of organizational and individual competencies to deliver and meet expectations.

THE WHAT, HOW AND WHERE OF ALIGNMENTTo succeed in our increasingly challenging environment, we need to ensure that we have strong alignment within our own organization and that of our partners. The process, methods, and tools also need to be in place and working effectively to sustain the level of collaboration we need.

The critical success factors here will be how we generate and sustain trust, share knowledge, get tight focus, and execute well.

Three domains will require attention to succeed:• Where: The level of clarity and agreement we have on

the target customer segments / accounts we want to focus on

• What: The value add of our integrated offerings into a whole solution for our target customers, and

What: Capabilities How: Value Chain Where: CustomerSegments/Accounts

BrandOwner

Partner

CORE

AUGMENTED

EXTENDED

CORE

AUGMENTED

EXTENDED

SERVICE &SUPPORT

IMPLEMENTATION

SALESMARKETING

PRODUCTS

SERVICE &

SUPPORTIMPLEMENTATION

SALES

MARKETING

PRODUCTS

? ?MARKET

DEVELOPMENT

?DIVERSIFICATION

?MARKET

PENETRATION

?PRODUCT/SERVICE

DEVELOPMENT

?

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PARTNERSHIP VALUE CHAINThe execution challenge begins with aligning the brand-owner value chain stakeholders around the objectives of the anticipated Go-To-Market initiatives and then securing their commitment, willingness, and ability to deliver their part. This is followed by securing alignment and commitment of the partnership stakeholders across the value chain.

The stakeholders represent in effect those in the value chain who take responsibility for the setting of objectives, the allocation of resources, and commitment to timelines.

• Ensuring that the joint solution meets the customer requirements

• Setting up and executing the joint lead generation activities

• Enabling the sales forces to better acquire, develop, and retain the targeted customers

• Providing the consulting and implementation skills necessary to deliver the solutions the customers buy

• Securing the support and service capabilities required to maintain and support the solutions across their productive lives

SOLUTIONS MARKETING SALES INSTALLATION SERVICE &SUPPORT

The activities to secure stakeholder alignment need to be highly effective in terms of effort-to-output and be executed in a consistent and well governed “plan, do, check” manner.

Achieving the highest level of effective planning, execution, and monitoring requires strong processes, focused methods, and well calibrated tools. In short, it requires the organizational and individual competencies to permit the stakeholders to make their contributions in a timely, efficient, and effective manner.

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CHAMP PROCESSThere exists a process that follows closely the rhythm of business planning within your organization. If fact, the ideal adoption and most productive leveraging of the processes, methodologies, and tools are within the framework of your planning and review cycle.

CHAMP is that process. It starts with the guidelines of the corporate strategy that the company gives out prior to a new financial year. The guidelines then flow into the review and update of partner profiles. The next step is to align the partnering strategy and create the partner business plans from an internal perspective.

Upon internal review and approval, the partner business plans are shared with the respective partners and are developed into joint business plans, which then enter a cycle of execution and review.

The company will, over the course of the financial year, track the results of executing the partnering strategy. This in turn leads into the new cycle of planning for the corporation.

CHAMPChannels and Alliances

ManagementProcess

Complete CHAMPPartner Pro�le

Conduct CHAMPPartner Planning

Hold InternalReviews

Share Ideaswith Partner

Conduct CHAMPJoint Planning

Implementthe Plan

Reviewand Update

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• To build on this understanding, we then approach the task of setting direction for incremental revenue by aligning our growth initiatives with our partners. The joint initiatives need to be prioritized and sized before determining the joint channel model required for success

• At this point we apply the planning methodology to set the goal for the partnership and determine the objectives and action plan that will generate revenue

• We then turn to the relationship and investment side of the partnership to examine the level of the relationship and the degree of sponsorship

• This leads to setting the relationship objectives, strategy, and action plan

• Then it is time to articulate the value propositions, which underpin the partnership

• Finally, it is time to determine the governance that will apply to the partnership

THE IMPORTANCE OF ROLE SEGMENTATION IN PARTNERINGAs you may expect, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach here. Most companies segment the role of partner management into different levels. The TAS Group recognized very early on that there are inherently different requirements in managing a global partnership with a distributed team and a partner manager covering a group of partners.

Typically, the portfolio is segmented into 3 broad categories: • Strategic: Very large, corporately managed in a

1-to-1, few-to-1, or many-to-1 type of relationship. The team will likely have a global, regional, and local management structure for the partnership in place. The challenge will be to manage a process of alignment, execution, and governance across multiple geographies and time zones through both the brand owner and the partner organizations

• Mass Market partners: Typically smaller partners that support lower end customers. Your company may have a 1-to-many territory management type structure in place

• In between those, you will have a 1-to-few mid-market portfolio focus in place where 1 partner manager will support a group of partners (usually between 5 and 20). The challenge is to maintain focus and objectivity to ensure the appropriate allocation of time to pursue growth

The CHAMP approach provides the components to apply the consistent process, methods, and tools to capture information and understand implications while setting the proper goals, objectives, and courses of action.

• We begin by assessing the partnership’s fundamentals to clarify why we both want the partnership, how to define success, and what will be expected across the value chain

• We then analyze the partner’s business to understand the organization, their growth strategy, capabilities, and sales model

StrategicAlliances

Mid-MarketPartners

Mass MarketPartners

many : 1

1 : few

1 : many

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• We conclude this part with Proactive Engagement — the approach we use to insure that the partners who are creating revenue today — this year — are being supported. We want to be ‘proactive’ in ensuring the right support is given to the highest potential opportunities

• We then take a look at and develop approaches to address the unexpected requests that impact our time. To do this, we create processes that work almost on ‘auto pilot’ to satisfy a good portion of those unexpected requests, which frees us to work on those high revenue generating opportunities. To do this, we: - Take a look at the nature of these requests and

where they come from to build a plan for acting on them in a programmatic fashion

- Enable us to satisfy the requests, while minimizing our personal involvement

• Finally, we’ll look at how to carry on the process once the PPM program is complete: - Completing and reviewing the plan - Sharing with the partners - Executing, checking and tuning

PARTNER PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT PROCESSThe Partner Portfolio Management (‘PPM’) process provides the same benefits for managing mid-market partners in a 1-to-few role.

• We begin by assessing our partners - Place the various partners into different categories

so that we can allocate resources to each group of partners based on revenue and potential for growth

- Where we focus – and where we de-focus

• We then discuss and determine the various approaches we can use to maximize the opportunity in each category of partner while best using the resources available to us

• There is a module on each of those approaches. We’ll discuss the approach and then apply it to the partners in each category. The first is Partner Account Management—for our highest potential partners. This approach is focused on developing our top partners so we both can continue to generate high levels of results over a long and sustained period of time

SUMMARYWe started out by looking at the challenges and pressures impacting the generation of alignment and the execution of strategy in partnerships.

We then outlined the benefits that accrue when you get the alignment and execution right.

Then, we covered how you get there by following the right process, either for your enterprise partners or a portfolio of mid-tier partners.

If you wish to find out more, please contact us at info@thetasgroup.com.

ABOUT THE TAS GROUPThe TAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves sales performance and accelerates sales results. We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a sales opportunity.

For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com

Copyright © The TAS Group. All rights reserved. This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission of The TAS Group.