Partnering & Distribution
An effective partner program enhances your company's ability to deliver full value to customers, and in so doing, increases your penetration of the target market. The company strategy identifies the core internal strengths, skill-sets, and specific value proposition that are the keys to your success and in which you will continue to internally invest. Partners complement these internal strengths by providing important (but not core) additional resources, functionality, or presence in specific customer markets and/or geographies. Partners help you deliver a whole solution to a specific market. Partnerships are relationships between independent entities, each with their own internal goals, strategies, and people; and as in any good relationship, effective partnerships incorporate shared goals, strategy, values, and power, as well as complementary strengths and skills. Good partnerships start and succeed based upon clear communications and expectations. To establish this clarity, partner programs must start with a careful analysis of their own partnership goals, requirements, and available resources. The most important partnerships require the highest level of compatibility and investment. The partner program must carefully identify and screen potential partners in relation to the partnership's specific objectives. Good partner programs clearly identify the priority and purpose for each (type of) partnership, as well as specific partner plans and activities, objectives, resource commitments, schedules, metrics, reporting, communications, and remediation. Finally, you must decide on the prominence of your partner program within your overall go-to-market strategy, and how to promote it to your market and prospects.
Company focus and product position must be specific and relate to the partner landscape. For example, the position of a platform provider can put the company into competition with virtually everyone in your space, including the big players (You know who they are!) and newcomers with hot specialized technology, or even a host of VARs that deliver integrated systems based on components. In the early stages of a market, platforms are often proprietary and do not inter-operate. In this phase, service providers build networks on integrated platforms supplied by individual vendors. As markets mature and grow, new competitors enter with improved "best-of-breed" technology and specialized products that dis-aggregate the functionality of previously integrated solutions. The new competitors focus on specific parts of the overall solution (market niches), but must partner (interoperate) with incumbents and with each other to deliver the whole solution.
If partnering is essential to client strategy, a structured approach quickly and specifically helps to identify what is needed from each partnership, potential companies with whom to partner and how to implement programs that reach company objectives without exhausting available resources.
RPM helps you to:
- Describe the partner landscape that delivers solutions to your target market.
- Determine how you should play within the market landscape based on relative strengths/weaknesses, company goals, culture, etc. The goals for partnering - strategic, to complete required product functionality, to ease market entry and increase presence, distribution, support, etc.
- Understand your specific fit with companies in the universe of potential partners.
- Develop the plan and programs to secure, implement, support, and measure your partner program.