Alliances aren’t new.
People refer to them as strategic partners.
But this isn’t always the same as having "field focused" partners, and it primarily has to do with the intent and the goals of strategic alliances.
Some strategic alliances are PR alliances. They are done to attract market attention, to demonstrate to customers and sometimes investors, that an alliance has been formed. These can be a way to address something that has been brought up by analysts in the market, for example. Sometimes these are done as a way to lay the groundwork for an acquisition.
Some alliances are corporate alliances in the sense that there is a complimentary relationship at a strategic level, such as market or product. In this case, high-level conversations are set up to extend the value more than just for PR purposes but because, say, technology groups of both sides will work together. Or product development and product marketing find ways to have a meaningful connection.
What is missing is how those translate directly into the "field" — which for companies that have a salesperson, whether it is the owner himself or an army of 200 inside and outside reps — is where the revenue is made.
Being able to execute down to the individual sales rep can have huge impacts on the bottom line, and often without significant costs. The problem is typically in execution.
However, it is important for companies to ask themselves whether their alliances are "corporate" which clearly have strategic advantages when done in ways that meet stratetic goals, or whether they are "field" which deals with execution and, from my perspective, more directly with revenue.
There might be many who disagree and say that corporate alliances do, in fact, deal with revenue and have the facts and figures to back it up. Which I think would be fine, it just hasn’t been my experience.
Simple ways to address it would be by answering:
- How many opportunities were created by a strategic partner?
- Which products were recommended?
- How many closed?
- How extensive was the involvement of the strategic partner, breaking down by region?
- How reciprocal is the relationship as a ratio of opportunities given and received?
One could argue that not all corporate allies can have these questions answered. In which case, there is no field component to them.
I would suggest on the flip side that there could be many field allies which haven’t had attention because there is no real "corporate" potential. In other words, just because a company doesn’t appear to have strategic and corporate value does not mean that they could not be a fantastic and revenue-generating "field" ally.
What is a brief example of a field ally that is not a corporate ally?
Let’s imagine a company sells load-balancing hardware. Their strategic partners might be the specialized manufacturer of the chip inside. Or they could be the company the sells routers on the edge…hardware that is related to what they are selling.
But let’s say they mostly sell to companies running applications that need high up-time and good performance. They could be a good "field" ally for a company which makes performance monitoring tools since both reps are going to be calling into the same title, types of companies, and have complimentary tools. The corporate heads at both may see the relationship as too tactical to be "strategic," but for the field, they have the three ingredients which we’ll talk about to identify good allies: contacts, context, and connection.
Field alliances can be spun up much faster than a corporate alliance. Field alliances can also be regional or maybe even vertical. The advantage and difference is that because it doesn’t need to appease the larger forces, it can be ad-hoc with the primary purpose of driving revenue by putting more feet on the street.
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