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What's the one thing that's keeping you from selling more effectively with your strategic alliance partner? Maybe it's more than one thing. Maybe it's many things. After all, half of all strategic alliances never deliver the results that were expected. Many never even come close.
The alliances that win accelerate the sales cycle... identify new opportunities within existing and new accounts... and increase share of wallet and mind share. Alliancesphere can help you get these results with your alliance partner. We view selling with an alliance partner as an iterative process, one that not only brings success but predicts it.
Collaborative Partner SellingTM is a facilitated process in which account/sales teams learn how to sell “collaborative solutions” with their alliance partners' account/sales teams. As fundamental as this description seems, it reflects a state that is both difficult to achieve in alliances and profoundly rewarding after it's been realized.
Most important, Collaborative Partner SellingTM is not an endless cycle of workshops and training sessions. Rather, it is an intensive, culture- and behavior-changing effort that involves transferring knowledge and skills to you. So you're assured of leveraging other methodologies as well as continuing the effort far into the future.
Collaborative Partner SellingTM is uniquely tailored to fit the culture of your company and the culture of your alliance partner. It's metric-driven. It's designed to complement your past and current investments in sales methodology and account planning — not duplicating these efforts or reinventing the wheel. The
Collaborative Partner SellingTM process involves:
- Working closely with key stakeholders to identify the teams and specific accounts that would benefit most from the
Collaborative Partner SellingTM process
- Aligning members of the account team in advance of an intensive workshop by setting expectations, reviewing workshop assignments and ensuring that all stakeholders share the same goals for the workshops
- Planning and conducting a professionally facilitated workshop in which account teams tear down the walls, adopt best practices and emerge with a unified focus and a new understanding of roles and responsibilities
- Developing a collaborative, actionable and metric-driven account plan that pinpoints targets, identifies the best joint solutions, generates demand needed to meet short- and long-term goals and solidifies the working relationships among team members
- Sustaining the energy that emerges from the workshop and building on the newly established unity through a consistent, disciplined process to keep the joint plan and team collaboration on track throughout the selling endeavor. This process delves into metrics, feedback from partners and experiences from the field, all to track progress and reinforce best practices
Some deals are "must win" opportunities — you simply can't afford to lose. Other deals require you to go deeper into the account to gain more detailed insights and build crucial relationships. In these instances, Alliancesphere intensifies
Collaborative Partner Selling™ efforts, working to unify the account teams around high-touch, high-focused solutions. We make sure the account teams are prepared to penetrate the target accounts with in-depth solutions, overcome any competitive threat or finesse a deal that requires significant orchestration.
If your alliance needs to seed the market, secure an early win quickly or build momentum around a specific or high-margin solution, this variation of
Collaborative Partner SellingTM is ideal. To manufacture a win, Alliancesphere works with your alliance team to intensively pursue (and win) a few best opportunities, then create a “wildfire” effect that spread to other opportunities.
Alliancesphere's Collaborative Partner SellingTM is proven to
work. Since 2003, we've deployed the Collaborative Partner
SellingTM process with well over 150 strategic client accounts
across five continents. An example wide-scale deployment has enabled alliances to generate a return of more than 100 times the investment in
Collaborative Partner SellingTM — as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in joint pipeline activities.
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