• Skills Mastery and Professional Certification Preparation: Advance your Career
• Program Benchmark Assessment: How Do You Measure Up?
• Managing Channel Conflict - Increase Channel Productivity
• Managing Partner Performance - Accelerate your Ramp to Results
• Strategic Development - Build Corporate Value
• Internal Alignment - Promoting a Partner Friendly Culture
• Program Design and Architecture - Operationalize a Framework for Success
• Alliance Basic Concepts - Establish Common Ground
• Triple A Partnerships: Assess, Align, Act - Troubleshooting Troubled Alliances
• Partner Marketing for Partner Selling - Double Your Marketing Impact
• Go-to-Market Services - From Vision to Reality - IDC/AIP Practice

Skills Mastery and Professional Certification Preparation
Advance your Career:

An experiential learning and skills mastery workshop to help alliance professionals prepare for the CAAM examination. The CAAM examination doesn’t just test for knowledge. It also tests the ability to apply best practices and principles to alliance management situations and to choose the best course of action in solving a difficult situation, in other words, the skills it takes to do the job. This workshop will focus on team problem solving within the context of case study scenarios, simulating the situations alliance managers face everyday, challenging participants to apply what they know. Scenarios reflect the competencies that are specified in the Detailed Content Outline, the test specification. Visit our Certification Center to learn more.

Program Benchmark Assessment: How Do You Measure Up?
Phoenix Consulting Group, an Authorized Implementation Partner of the IDC’s Global Software Partnering Best Practices research group, has collaborated in creating:

Architecting Effective Partner Programs (IDC#32279). This program assessment guide helps companies benchmark their programs against the standards and best practices in the industry. The results of the benchmark will identify program best practices, establish priorities for improvement, or provide external validation of program investments. The guide contains more than 40 elements of program architecture addressing questions such as:

• How is the partner program kept in alignment with corporate strategic initiatives?
  
• Is there alignment between partner needs and program benefits?
  
• How do partner access information and obtain support for their relationship?
  
• Is there market advantage to partners participating in your ecosystem?
  
• What metrics are used to measure the impact of the partner program?

Companies that regularly benchmark their partner program are better able to make informed decisions where to make new investments in the competitiveness and effectiveness of their partner programs. The impact is greater value returned to the corporation.

Improve Channel Productivity
Managing Channel Conflict
Channel conflict can be a debilitating force in your sale organization. Channel cooperation will:

• Gain back "selling time"
• Accelerate your sales cycle
• Grow your revenue

Effectively manage channel conflict through:

• Market segmentation and sales coverage allocation
• Appropriate channel friendly compensation strategies
• Clear rules of engagement, and
• Enlightened sales management practices

We will provide evaluation and audit services to identify your sources of channel conflict and help you implement the solution to create channel cooperation in your selling model. One company found that sales reps were spending 50% of their time managing channel conflict and competing against channel partners. By resolving the issues contributing to the channel conflict, the company gained back the lost selling time, accelerated the sales cycle by incenting channel cooperation, contributing to doubling of their revenue from the previous year.

Accelerate partner time to revenue
Managing Partner Performance
Intelligent management of the partner development life cycle from recruitment to revenue growth can not only accelerate your partners' time to revenue but also accelerates the time to realize the financial goals of your channel or alliance.

As partners develop a business around your products and services, they must integrate your technology into their value proposition, build a go-to-market strategy to differentiate the joint offer to customers, develop the sales capacity and competency to sell this offer effectively and finally deliver on customer expectations to ensure future growth. Through this practice:

• Evaluate your partners' path to revenue to ensure there are no gaps or obstructions in the process
• Ensure the appropriate tools and support are in place for each stage of development
• Define metrics at each phase to track progress and success
• Recommend positive intervention to keep partners on track
  

Build Corporate Value
Strategic Development
Your partner and channel strategies should be in alignment with your corporate goals and business objectives whether these are to expand to new markets, increase share of customer, or provide greater value to your customers through complementary technologies and services. We provide tools and models to:

• Assess your partnering requirements
• Align your partner strategy with your corporate strategy
• Build the financial business case
• Define the sales engagement model
• Identify specific partner targets
  

Create a Partner Friendly Culture
Internal Alignment
Executing on a partner strategy requires alignment, cooperation and support across corporate functions. Educating these functions on the benefits, financial expectations, and investment to support a high performance partner program or alliance is critical to the ultimate success of your partner strategy.

There are several organizational red flags:

• Professional services compete with your alliances or channel partners.
• Partners need free or highly discounted training, but the company manages technical education as a P/L. Company views partner training as lost revenue opportunity not as an investment in corporate growth.
• Appropriate partner technical support may differ from your customer offerings.
• Your sales organization needs to be reoriented, retooled, compensated and goaled to work with partners.
• Marketing messages and programs do not accommodate partner collaboration.
• Product management and engineering do not design for "channel readiness"
• New product introduction plans omit to include partners early so they can incorporate new products into their businesses without disruption in revenue.

We will work with you in building the business case and gain cross company executive commitment to transform the business operations of your company to adopt a partner friendly culture.

Operationalize Framework for Success
Program Design/Architecture
Whether you are building a multi-channel partner program, a broad technology alliance program, a selective strategic alliance program, we can help you architect a partner program to meet your needs and budget.

Successful partner programs are designed to support the lifecycle development of a partnership. These phases include: Development, Technical Enablement, Go-to-Market Plan, Sales Engagement, and Growth Management.

Program design elements can include:

• Program tiers or tracks
• Entry criteria
• Advancement criteria
• Benefits for each program tier
• Market development funds
• Lead generation and distribution
• Referral fees
• Partner development lifecycle support
• Partner performance commitments and metrics
• Communications strategy
• Partner branding strategy
• Business Practices and Policies
• Agreements
• Pricing Models
  

Establish Common Ground
Alliance Basic Concepts
An interactive discovery session reviewing alliance basic concepts while auditing company partnering practices. Create an environment for your all functional organizations and your partners to find common ground in partnering principles and successful execution.

Troubleshooting Troubled Partnerships
Triple A Partnerships
Trouble shooting lackluster partnerships. Common wisdom estimates that over half of the alliances formed between two companies fail. Why? Building successful alliances is a complex process. This half day working session with key stakeholders to ASSESS, ALIGN, and ACT will get a key partnership back on track.

Double your Marketing Impact
Partner Marketing for Partner Selling
Map your marketing messages and marketing programs to optimize the revenue production process of your partnership. The result is more revenue-relevant marketing that will raise lead quality, accelerate sales in the pipeline, and increase closure rate. You will be able to create precision-targeted messages, powerful marketing campaigns and effective sales tools designed for one purpose - more revenue.

• Empower your sales organization with tools to accelerate sales and win more business through partnerships.
• Create precision messaging targeted to the business drivers of decision-makers, recommenders, and influencers for your joint value proposition.
• Develop specific action recommendations that aligns your partner marketing to support revenue objectives.
  

From Vision to Reality
IDC, with a select group of Authorized Implementation Partners (AIPs), has created end-to-end solutions to help companies critically evaluate their partnering and alliance needs, develop strategically sound frameworks, and implement best-in-class programs and initiatives with clear and measurable ROI.

AIPs complement IDC's research and strategic advisory services by providing the experience of seasoned practitioners to help you through the implementation process.

We are offering practices that we believe address the most compelling challenges facing partner organizations today.

Download our White Paper: From Vision to Reality (141KB PDF)