Partnering strategy

Understanding where your business is headed is the first step. Everything you build for your reseller channel, partner programme and or strategic alliance strategy needs to be lined up behind your companies business strategy. The reseller channel, partner programme and or strategic alliance business objectives, targets and goals all need to be derived from this.

A workshop tends to work well to gathering information to design a reseller channel, partner programme and or strategic alliance strategy. During the workshop make sure you make use of the British Standards Institute's Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 11000 Collaborative Business Relationships standard. It is a best practice framework and will ensure you cover all of the basics. Company Alliances will challenge your thinking during this process, especially on the reseller channel, partner programme and or strategic alliance value proposition to ensure that all motivations and incentives will trigger partners into action deliver the results you want.

How are you going to attract partners? A marketing plan needs to be developed to get them on board. How will you help partners succeed? Do you need another marketing plan to help generate leads for them? Maybe, maybe not. Are you ready for success? If twenty partners sign up in the first week, have you the resources to train them? Do you even have a training course? Yes it is not quite as easy as you may have invisaged, but don't worry that is why we are here, to help you succeed.

Partnering Guides

A little luxury for those that can afford it. A Partnering Guide is a physical brochure that you can hand to potential resellers and or partners that make you look extremely professional and will make them want to work with you. Partnering Guides contain:

• what you have to offer
• why you have chosen this route to market
• what types of resellers you are looking for
• why their clients will be interested
• why they should be interested
• and much more 
  

It demonstrates that you have considered all the options and are fully prepared to do business with partners. With Partnering Guides you avoid ambiguity and prevent misunderstandings about what is being proposed. Additionally:

• ensures all your channel and business development managers "sing from the same hymn sheet".  In addition:
• increase the effectiveness of your channel and business development managers
• help potential partners fully prepare themselves in line with your business objectives
• raise your profile within a prospective reseller's organisation
• make your organisation look very professional
• differentiate you from your competitors
• increase your brand awareness
• weed out timewasters
• speed up the potential resellers' decision making processes

Finding and engaging with partners

This is the stage where you get full of optimisum, raring to sign up partners left, right and centre.  It is also the stage where most partnering strategies start to go wrong.  Prior to this stage it is essential to have your ideal partners in mind with a set of criteria to test against and measure their suitability.  In most cases there are large numbers of potential partners, assuming you know how to find them, so the partner criteria is an ideal tool to use to focus down on the most likely candidates. For those you select you will need to sell both the end user value proposition and the value proposition to the partner's business.

Feedback during this phase is crucial. You will find out how your solution and partnering proposition stacks up against the competition. If the partners' effort of marketing your solution is higher than the potential rewards, or a competitor is easier and or provides greater rewards then our own partnering strategy may need a rethink. Feedback during this phase is crucial.

Sales Guides make Partners work easier 

Another luxury. Just like your own sales people needing information in order to market and sell your products and or services, so do your partners sales people.  Typicaly the difference is that the partner sales people need instructions on selling a joint proposition that includes your own products and or services and theirs.  There are many ways to achieve this and Company Alliances offers services through a tried and trusted partner - Istaris Limited.  Istaris are experts in writing sales literature for sales people.  With our partnering expertise and their exceptionally high quality sales literature the joint proposition is compelling.   

Managing partners to deliver against agreed objectives, targets and goals 

Communications and processes are the keys to ensuring that the collaboration keeps healthy and growing.  The PAS 11000 Collaborative Business Relationships does a good job guiding you into designing the processes for communication.  Many partnerships are based on marketing and sales agreements with the intent of increasing sales for both organisations, targeting new markets or geographies.  Hire Company Alliances now, share the risk and rewards, get the experts on board that succeed. Contact now