What is involved in establishing new partnerships? Why does SAS need partners? What do SAS alliance managers do anyway? What does this have to do with you? With these questions in mind, I bring you the top 5 things you should know about alliances.
1. Alliance Relationships Require Care and Feeding
Alliance relationships are much like personal relationships, they require care and feeding to establish and grow. Alliance relationships are made up of a series of personal relationships between executives and stakeholders at both companies. Managing these relationships, developing the shared vision and constructing and executing the joint business plan, is the raison d’etre of the Alliance Manager. All alliances are established based on a promise of mutual value. The role of the Alliance Manager is “value creation” – orchestrating resources, aligning strategic goals, managing conflict to ensure that SAS (and the partner) realize mutual value.
2. Alliances are a Team Sport
The alliance organization is one of the few completely dependent organizations at SAS – that is to say, we are completely dependent upon the involvement of other organizations to successfully develop and execute alliances. When we make a commitment to a partner, we are making a corporate commitment to that partner on behalf of SAS. This means that many organizations at SAS (sales, product marketing, product management, PSD, legal, field marketing, external communications, etc.) have a role to play and will be engaged early and often. Alliances are a team sport!
3. Alliances Make the Pie Bigger
There is sometimes a misperception that working with partners is a “zero sum game” - that the more money a partner makes on a deal, the less money SAS will make on a deal. In actual fact, more times than not, a partner will help make the size of the pie bigger – “supersize” the deal if you will. How? In a few ways. 1) Several of our partners are very large organizations with thousands of employees and deep presence in Fortune 1000 firms. Smaller and medium size partners may not be as large, but they may have deep domain expertise in areas were SAS has limited expertise. In both instances, partnering with these firms enhances our reach and our credibility.
In 2010, partners impacted 60% (3 out of 5) of the top 50 deals at SAS.
4. Alliances help drive innovation!
We are collaborating with partners in many of our key technology innovations (e.g. high performance computing) and partners also provide benchmarking/tuning/optimization and new technology adoption support.
In addition to supporting SAS’ technology innovation, partners also help identify new opportunities, in which we collaborate to deliver joint initiatives. We have developed the Path to Market (PTM) process for qualifying, approving and executing joint initiatives with partners.
5. Alliances is profession!
Most of the alliance professionals in Global Alliances and Channels are certified alliance professionals, who have earned their certification through The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). ASAP is the largest global professional organization dedicated to alliance formation and management. SAS is a Global Sponsor of ASAP and we have encouraging our key partners to become members as well. We leverage ASAP best practices in our work.
Thanks to Donna Peek, Sr. Alliance Manager, for providing content to this post. Our next post will keep these points in mind when we talk about how to build effective partnerships.
What makes or breaks an alliance? Check back with us to find out!
