Whitepapers

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.
(download 103KB PDF)

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)