Entries Tagged 'Why Need an Allyforce' ↓

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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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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How long does it take to find the right person, the right contact, at the right company?

If you do the math in terms of the number of targetable companies, and the number of contacts a sales rep can adequately touch in a quarter, what percentage of the addressable market are you effectively reaching?

This may sound like a marketing question, but for many companies, they expect lead generation to come from sales reps.  And their approach is to select a subset of potential targets and try to find the right person before the competition does.

Nothing hurts more than reaching a prospect just after they’ve made a decision with a competitor.  It’s painful, and it’s happening more often.

So what is your time to prospect?

One of the benefits of leveraging an effective Allyforce is that you are putting more sales-focused feet on the street to ferret out potential prospects and getting the right person to talk to.  Yes, with all the tools like LinkedIn and Facebook, there are more ways to get information, but still — imagine if your Allyforce reps are doing the same and uncovering new opportunites and contacts that you are sharing.

You could be potentially doubling the numbers of feet on the street.

Because time-to-prospect — which is  much more granular and sales-focused that just time-to-market — matters, one of the only leverageable ways to do it is through an Allyforce.

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