13 Best Practices for Profitable Partnering: Power Partnering with Alliances, Channels, Distributors and Resellers

Description

Working with business partners like alliances and channel partners has become vital for developing complex business and IT solutions, to dynamically capture market share and increase revenue.

Today, no single firm possesses all the expertise to perform every required task single-handedly – not even broad-line product manufacturers such as IBM and HP or giant service providers such as EDS, Accenture and (again) IBM Global Services. Business partners – large and small – play different roles during the customer buying process, ranging from pre-sales strategic consultancy to after-sales maintenance, systems management and outsourcing.

For product and services manufacturers, this need for cooperation with different types of business partners – including systems integrators, solution providers and independent consultants – leads to questions such as:

• What partnering practices should be adopted to gain trust and commitment from business partners. Trust and commitment being the two essential elements that are instrumental to successful relationships?

• How do we measure our partnering performance vis-à-vis competitors?

During our work as management consultants with clients including IBM, Oracle, HP, DuPont, Canon, Novartis and Sun, we have gathered the Best Partnering Practices in the industry drawn from several independent sources and combined them with our own work with 100’s of manufacturers and business partners. These thirteen best-of-breed practices have been identified as market leader practices, based on revenue performance, professional behavior and evaluation by business partners. In this book, we summarize our findings.

We present the Best Partnering Practices drawn primarily from the IT industry which has led the way, and we provide some striking examples of companies who ignored the importance of applying these practices. Although we do not claim that implementing these practices guarantees success, we know for certain that not implementing them will definitely prevent manufacturers from being successful.

We observe that manufacturers who are more advanced with respect to implementing these Best Partnering Practices tend to be more successful than the ones that are less advanced. This supports our observation that – without discounting the importance of strategy – “success is predominantly based on seamless operations” and implementation. This key role for operations is particularly true when products and services are less differentiated and are becoming increasingly me-too commodities.

We believe that the Partnering Best Practices Assessment should be the starting point of every strategic and operational evaluation of the manufacturer’s current channel position. Using our detailed assessment tools, this Partnering Best Practices Assessment will unveil the strengths and weaknesses of the manufacturer’s channel management system and help find ways to improve performance.