Allyforce: the power of partnership

 

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Let’s do another workshop to show how Allyforce could work.  I’m going to use as an example a “random” company I came across called Elluminate which sells web-conferencing technology to education.

Why should they create an allyforce?

I sold as part of my territory into colleges, and I found getting contact information to be incredibly difficult.  Sometimes the titles or department that I would need to call on was difficult to find.  And in some cases, knowing what was the right existing infrastructure at the institution ( I was selling IT Infrastructure), would’ve helped.

I’m not saying education is any harder than calling into other industry organizations, but it wasn’t any easier.

Whom should they invite into their allyforce?

They are already far out the starting gate!  They had a formal partner program and with some excellent companies.  Blackboard is one of them.  I partnered with them and they are everywhere and know everyone in Education.  Well, not everyone: even I found contacts and people they weren’t having discussions with.

The challenge: I didn’t know which rep to call, whether they had a relationship or not, and so it was a very sporadic conversation.  But when we did talk — boy, it was like gold.  I just needed a way to automatically match me with the right reps regarding the right accounts and have a seamlessly way to see contacts and account information.

Here are the other partners Elluminate could quickly work with:

• Blackboard
• eCollege
• Fronter

They also have training partners whom, I am sure, have products and clients other than Elluminate.  If they could exchange information, there is a mutual (possibly even Financial) incentive to do so.

• Cyberstream
• eLearning Innovations

Each of these companies probably has a rep.  What if a single Elluminte rep could easily match, connect, and communicate with, say, five other reps in the education space.

Who are they missing?

So, hey, not a bad start.  But there are plenty of other people targeting schools — I looked on Craigslist for companies that are hiring reps selling to schools.  Not all were selling to IT but some were.

Maybe the products weren’t complimentary, which is usually how partnerships are formed; but the territory and the titles being prospected to do.  For example?

• Schoolloop: intelligent websites
• Revolution: tutorial services targeting school administrators to develop partnerships

What about others?

My friend used to run the Bay Area territory for schools and government for Peoplesoft.  There’s probably not going to be a formal relationship, but an informal relationship where reps and exchanging with each other…why not?

Feed the network…and the network will feed you!

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