It’s a pertinent question that many companies do not ask when they decide to embark on a partner strategy. Many companies enter into a partnership strategy with the goal “I want more sales” but never develop the strategy so it can be articulated into words that a partner will understand. It is strange bearing in mind we would never sell to a customer like this. 

To understand why someone would want to partner with you, you need to understand the pain chain within your target organisation. Who is feeling pain at the moment, and what is that pain? How does this reflect up and down the chain of command? What are the repercussions of this to the organisation? 

In addition to this you then need to understand their corporate strategy and what is actually happening on the street to meet the revenue goals. An example maybe the corporate statement is “We empower senior management within our clients to manage their business by use of management dashboards”. On the ground the company is actually selling lots of consultancy to build standard business reports not used by managers. The reasons for this divide needs to be understood. 

You then need to combine these pains and goals with your company offering to create a sales pitch as to why you are the solution to these problems. If you can’t articulate this, you are never going to have a successful partnership. 

Remember one sale doesn’t make a good partnership, it takes five to ten!

Ian I agree with you completely, I have had set up a number of alliance programs, and management quite often have two problems, the first of these is an unrealistic expectation of what they are going to achieve and the second is conflict.

 When people talk about what they are going to achieve it is not only a monetary value, it is also about change in the organisation. Managers need to think about how this will effect there services, support, marketing and sales operation as each one of these will be effected by the addition of a channel.

 The conflict is caused by a lack of understanding by all parties of what this change means.