Aligning team members and stakeholders to support the work of an alliance or any business relationship can be surprisingly treacherous. One would think that if the strategic intent and return on investment on an alliance is clear the rest falls into place. Well, guess again. At PhoenixCG we look at team alignment in two dimensions: [...]
Launching new website turned out to be much more of an involved exercise than I imagined. In this day and age, the website is the face of the company and so a new website caused us to rethink the business, the practice areas, and the positioning of PhoenixCG for the future. Since the founding of [...]
I did a study three years ago of partner health across 14 strategic alliances and about ~400 respondents and found something very interesting about the nature of trust in alliances. We did a correlation of heath attributes against overall partner health. We found that when 'trust' was present it did not score very high in [...]
Innovation takes many forms. We often focus on innovation as technological breakthroughs and indeed those are important to fuel corporate growth. But there are other forms of innovation which can be just as powerful and just as disruptive to the status quo in creating strategic competitive advantage. Innovation in operations, in business processes and in [...]
Certification assures Collaborative Capability: Taking Partnering to the Next Level I was fortunate to be featured in an interview for the Marketing Thought Leadership series with Linda Popky, Marketing Master and recently named one of Silicon Valley's Top 100 Women of Influence. In this podcast interview, I was asked to speak about the growing recognition [...]
One area in which social media is gaining traction is support services.When you combine partners in an interactive forum they become a self-help community.When you add customers to the mix, your partners become very competitive in demonstrating their expertise to the customer base.The result is very organic but very effective way of providing support services. [...]
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009 Social media is gaining presence within partner ecosystems These are natural communities and naturally lend themselves to these media.There has been a trend for some time by large vendor companies to position themselves as the hub in a vendor-centric partner ecosystem. Most have built [...]
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009Well, arguably yes and no. Some technologies that might be labeled early Web 2.0 were in pretty widespread usage. Others such as Twitter are caught up in the tornado. Some, such as MySpace, already seem to be in decline. Blogs, wikis, and web meeting technology [...]
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting GroupOf the 20 partner managers we interviewed, most were realizing productive benefits from the use of social media. Benefits were described in terms of strengthening relationships versus the hard metrics of generating leads and revenue.Yet as many of the activities were integrated into the process of doing [...]
Social media hype is everywhere. We are deluged with it on-line. We see it on TV. Our kids are absorbed by Facebook. The State department even requests that Twitter delays maintenance to ensure continuity in the information flow from civil unrest in Iran. Even as we are coming to grips with Social media - socially, [...]