Another common objection I hear is that the company executives believe they already have "alliance" and "strategic partnerships."
I would agree: they do. But what is the outcome of that?
But the questions in terms of assessing their success are pretty simple:
- Do you receive leads, say, at least five per quarter per sales person?
- Do you have weekly metric reviews of the mutual exchange of leads?
- Are your reps in the field exchanging "field-level information" about different accounts?
- Do they understand the basic question to ask prospects to find deals for you?
- Is there an effective, consistent, and measurable incentive-system in place?
Without putting something like that in place, it is often very difficult to successfully have a true revenue-generating alliance.
Powered by Qumana
Once you begin to see the benefits, why is it that most companies either do not do it, or do it poorly?
A large part of it is that, particularly in the beginning, it takes time without immediate, apparent gain. When you are dealing with a sales organization, no one wants to take that on. It becomes hard to measure and even harder to see good results.
It is much easier to focus on activities which look like they are immediately building up a pipeline or growing an organization that most people can understand (a reseller channel, for example).
An Allyforce is difficult because it *appears* as if value isn’t being created right way. *Traditionally* it has been hard to measure success.
This could potentially fall into a marketing category because it’s primary role is the identification of leads. However, marketing typically doesn’t handle it because a good allyforce, by definition, works very closely with the field. It involves management of field-level resources, and that is often not something that marketing owns. They work within corporate.
Granted, these are generalizations and people may object to these, but it describes the primary underpinnings of why people are not effectively creating and building these allyforces from a resource-allocation perspective. They don’t *perceive* a return and so do not fund a headcount to tackle it.
The reality is that, it often does not take on a full head-count, particularly once it is up and running. So as a result, it gets tacked-on to someone else’s primary objective. As an "add-on" it fails to get attention.
So the way to tackle it best is:
- create a way for just a temporary person to play the role and set it up — therefore not taking a full FTE
- enable easy management an on-going basis out to the field…
- but with ways for corporate to measure and manage
- create a way to scale it so the costs are lower since the benefits are longer-term
Powered by Qumana
