Whitepapers & Articles
Which Metrics Matter
When you ask an alliance manager which metrics matter, more often than not you will hear some version of “revenue, revenue, and revenue.” Yet many businesses have moved to a more holistic view of measuring value. The balanced scorecard has been widely adopted as a method of looking at not only financials, but strategic, tactical, and operational performance, as well as intangibles that contribute to the capacity to generate value. A single metric cannot give you the insight necessary to manage all the ingredients required to sustain a successful alliance. Companies that manage successful alliances tend to measure performance in multiple dimensions and high performing alliances tend to track certain metrics that non-performers do not.
Cross Sector Innovation and the Role of Alliances
The California Chapter of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals held their annual Alliance Executive Roundtable on January 13, 2011. The meeting, hosted by Google on their Mountain View Campus, was attended by twenty‐four of the area’s most senior alliance leaders representing a cross‐section of the business community. Participants voiced their views on the discussion topic of: Cross Sector Innovation and the Role of Alliances.
The group explored the role alliance managers play in creating new opportunities through innovation across non‐traditional industries such as high tech with healthcare, construction and energy. Special guest, Steve White, Program Director for the IDC Software Alliances
Leadership Council, shared IDC’s 2011 outlook for IDC and shared some of the trends and predictions.
Alliance Strategy for Challenging Times
At a time of economic contraction, budget cut backs, and job reductions, many organizations cut very deep into their alliance and partnering capability. Yet Cisco made the decision to maintain and even modestly increase their investment in strategic alliance partnerships and saw greater business productivity, access to new markets and new sources of revenue as a result.
Partner Health Diagnostic –
Enabling Transformational Alliances
The ultimate goal of a diagnostic is to improve alliance relationships and performance by acting on objective feedback. These answers and responses to these questions immediately lead to an open and actionable discussion on how to improve alliance performance.
(download 1.1MB PDF)
Effective Executive Sponsorship
Strong and effective executive sponsorship is critical to alliance success. Executive sponsorship begins at the top with the CEO who sets the example in supporting partner relationships.
(download 79KB PDF)
Optimizing Partner Investments
Partner Surveys can reveal the strengths and weaknesses in your program and help you make fact-based decisions on where to invest.
(download 114KB PDF)
Building Win-Win-Win Value Propositions:
The Key to Sustainable Partnerships
Successful go-to-market alliances start with a compelling JOINT value proposition, one that addresses the customer buying motivations first. Creating value propositions for all stakeholders in the partnership creates not just a WIN-WIN partnership, but a WIN-WIN-WIN where the customer wins, too. Customer value ultimately translates into value for the partners in creating new products or services and new sales opportunities.
(download 71KB PDF)
Build, Buy, Partner: Speed your time to Market
Product marketing, management and development departments have pressure from all sides to add competitive differentiation to product, fill in product line gaps and offer a complete solution to customers. Product groups have three strategies they can choose from to solve these issues: Build products or components from scratch, buy components, product, product lines or companies, or partner with companies to meet these product development needs.
(download 287KB PDF)
Ramp to Results
Published in IDC Software Business Strategies, July 2002
The advantage of partnering is that it creates leverage. A company can extend its own capabilities with far less up-front investment in time, headcount, and dollars than it would take to build these capabilities in-house. By pro-actively managing the partner development lifecycle, partner managers can accelerate partner performance.
(download 41KB PDF)
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