Primarily Allyforce concepts emerged from my needs to manage a large territory of prospects and try to find where are the best opportunities quickly with few resources.  The hunt and peck approach to finding the appropriate person was too difficult for some of the reasons described earlier.

If you are in Large Account Management, this can be valuable if you have a cluster of other companies calling onto the same key accounts.  Why?  Because the points of entry into a large account or multiple.  And the politics are shifting. 

When you use an effective Allyforce of being able to share meaningful account contacts, context, and even in some cases connections with Large Accounts — think Global 50 — that becomes powerful.

Why?

One of the things people advise is to research a companies website, their annual report/10K, and news.  All that is absolutely valuable and should be done.  It’s table stakes to get into the game.

One principle I work off of us, if the information is publicly available to everybody else, including my competition, what is my advantage?  Yes, you can have better execution and better solution and, again, those are important.  But understanding the customer in ways that others do not is a very powerful differentiator.

This can be insight into a key problem, an initiative that isn’t made public, the political agendas of key personnel, insight into who is, in fact, the real personnel — all of these things typically cannot be easily found.

But your Allyforce may have bits and pieces of it.  Unlikely one person will know everything.

Think about your own experience working — especially breaking into — a large Global 50 or Fortune 50 account.  You could start at the very top and work with the administrative assistant of the CEO — which you should still do, although people are already doing that.  Or you could tap your collective Allyforce for the right pieces of nuggets and contacts, context, and connection.

They could have lost a deal, but gone through an extensive cycle.  They could be a prospect they’ve been trying to break into and could piggy-back or accelerate opportunities by partnering with you. 

The point is: even if you need to focus on a handful of companies, if the challenge is finding the right sets of people and getting insight and information not easily available, an Allyforce can work for you.

There are some minor adjustments in the way it is deployed, but the principles can remain the same.

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