Every alliance professional has had some form of this happen:
Your boss asks for influenced revenue within a specific alliance or joint solution.
The truth is: You don’t have an answer. The information is simply unavailable, because it’s buried in outdated spreadsheets, and hidden across you and your alliance’s businesses.
Sound familiar? It’s not just you — every alliance professional has faced that situation.
Matt Gale and Jason Boggs came on the Alliance Aces Podcast to share this and 2 other issues every alliance professional faces … and how they solved them.
Matt Gale is the Director for Go to Market & Strategic Alliances, and Jason Boggs is the Senior Director for Cloud Ecosystem & Enablement. Both of them work at NTT DATA Services.
Issue 1: Alliance Data Lives in … Spreadsheets
Much of alliance data is often housed in spreadsheets or a variety of different systems between all the companies within the alliance.
Quickly delivering a stat on say influenced revenue for a partner, is almost impossible. It would take so long to pull information from the available systems, that by the time a stat was delivered, it would likely be out of date.
(A real-time system that integrates with you and your partner’s CRM … wouldn’t that be nice? Guess what? Matt and Jason found it.)
Issue 2: Buy-in From the C-suite
Often times, (perhaps because of the lack of data), alliances never enjoy the full long-term support of the c-suite. The pendulum for hiring marketing directors and professionals swings from hire to a fire phase every other year, making long-term commitment impossible.
Again, how do you solve this? With data that proves the revenue growth opportunities of strategic partnerships.
Issue 3: No System Exclusively for Alliances
Here's an interesting point Jason made: Whether its sales needing a CRM or marketing using a marketing automation platform, each business operation has a mound of tech to choose from.
Well, every operation except for alliances, Jason said.
But here’s the solution:
The 1 Solution, for All 3 Issues:
These 3 solutions aren’t unique to Matt and Jason.
If their story resonates with you, it’s because you’re probably experiencing the same issues. We know. We are all alliance professionals here, and we had the same issues.
We couldn’t find the data that we needed in a usable, consumable format. Buy-in from top-level management was an ever-elusive chase. And, worst of all … we felt technologically alone.
This is the heart behind our product, Workspan, the first platform exclusively for alliances.
(Yes: That’s how Jason and Matt solved all 3 of those issues)
To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to the Alliance Aces Podcast, or visit our dedicated Alliance Aces page.
This episode is part of the Alliance Aces Roadshow. Watch the video interview on Facebook.
To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about alliances, he can be reached by:
- Email: chip@workspan.com
- Twitter: @chiprodgers
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiprodgers
