This White Paper will point out to you where the challenges lie in partnering successfully. You'll get fresh insight into the partnership value chain and learn the activities you should be executing as part of a proven partnering process.

1. Enterprise
Level
Partnering
WHITE PAPER

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PARTNERING CHALLENGES
The unprecedented degree of market fluctuation, over the
last few years, has our leaders in the board rooms exerting
extra pressure to bring in results to meet expectations. All
market players are facing softening demand, therefore
everyone will be fighting harder for the attention and
commitment of partners and customers. In a shrinking
pool of opportunity, avoiding the inevitable conflicts across
multiple routes to market is bound to be a drag on resources.
Enterprise Level Partnering
INTRODUCTION
It’s hard enough to make sure your own sales
organization is speaking with one consistent voice, so
when you add major partners to the mix the challenge
becomes even tougher. When partnering, how do you
make sure you’re both truly aligned, how do you plan
your growth strategy, and how should you set up the
joint rules of engagement so you’re selling through or
with them, but not driving up your costs by selling for
them? ThisWhite Paper will point out to you where the
challenges lie in partnering successfully. You’ll get fresh
insight into the partnership value chain and learn the
activities you should be executing as part of a proven
partnering process.
As with any of ourWhite Papers, there will be a
big variance in the seniority and experience of the
readership. Some of you will perhaps be in your first
managerial role, looking to focus on what’s really
important in the deal. Others may be more seasoned
sales leaders at Director, Managing Partner, orVP
level tuning in to make sure you’re in step with the
latest thinking and technologies. ThisWhite Paper
aims to provide something for the complete range of
requirements, since the ideas and recommendations
have applicability right up the leadership hierarchy.
However, if you want to dig deeper or move wider, we
urge you to get in touch with us individually. You can
do this via email to: info@thetasgroup.com.
ThisWhite Paper will cover 3 key areas. We’ll start
by analyzing why partner alignment is so difficult,
especially now. We’ll then outline the good things
that happen when you get the alignment and strategy
execution right. For this, we’ll take the perspectives
of the stakeholders. After that, we’ll cover how you
execute correctly by breaking down the challenges
into their component parts and address the process for
both your enterprise and/or your portfolio of mid-tier
partners. We’ll conclude by summarizing the benefits
that we’ve covered.
Partnering
Strategy
Multiple
Routes to
Market
Shorter
Product Life
Cycles
Complex,
Complete
Solutions
Customer’s
Use ofTechnology
as a Stategic
Weapon
Aggressive
Growth
Board
Room / Wall
Street
Aggressive
Competition
Digital
Economy

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BENEFITS OF CHANNEL ALIGNMENT
Obviously, different stakeholders view their benefits from
different perspectives.
At the C-level, the benefit is leveraging the channel to
accelerate time-to-market, drive profit, and customer
satisfaction. This group of stakeholders is looking to a well-
oiled machine to deliver on the expectations derived from the
growth strategy:
• Customer / partner retention and loyalty
• Consistency of the brand and value experience
• Acceleration of strategy execution
At theVP-level, the focus is on growing revenue (through the
channel):
• Grow channel revenue, reduce costs, and increase
profits
• Consistent, reliable, and predictable customer
interaction from channel partners
• Manage the joint pipeline to enhanced partner
performance
For channel marketing, increasing brand and market
awareness will be important:
• Consistent product knowledge and marketing
collateral
• Joint demand generation events, campaigns, plans
• Return of effort on MDF investment and marketing
activities
And finally for customer and partner service, it will be about
increasing satisfaction:
• Secure the best response to service requirements
• Securing the service experience to build loyalty
• Customer and partner satisfaction
The brew of pressures is sufficiently potent to ensure a
significant challenge within one’s own company in securing
alignment and focus. If we also consider the perspective of
our partners, the task of generating mutual alignment and
focus required to meet our objectives becomes a Herculean
one.
We should be conducting our planning efforts to answer the
following questions from an operational perspective:
• How will we protect our current revenue streams?
• What incremental opportunities can we identify and
pursue?
• How will we ensure that we consistently meet
expectations in this very unpredictable environment?
From a strategy execution perspective, the question becomes,
“how do we acquire, deploy, and enhance the organizational
and individual competencies to grow the competitive
advantage of the company in partnering to consistently meet
our targets?”

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• How: Our ability to integrate our respective company
value chains into a joint virtual value chain, which will
connect the offerings that we want to bring to our
target customers. This part constitutes the hub for
operational execution of the strategy
How well the“how”is executed ultimately determines the
answers to three questions we started out with:
• How will we protect our current revenue streams?
• What incremental opportunities can we identify and
pursue?
• How will we ensure we consistently meet expectations
in a very unpredictable environment?
This, of course, brings us back to the command of
organizational and individual competencies to deliver and
meet expectations.
THEWHAT, HOW ANDWHERE
OF ALIGNMENT
To succeed in our increasingly challenging environment, we
need to ensure that we have strong alignment within our own
organization and that of our partners.The process, methods,
and tools also need to be in place and working effectively to
sustain the level of collaboration we need.
The critical success factors here will be how we generate and
sustain trust, share knowledge, get tight focus, and execute
well.
Three domains will require attention to succeed:
• Where:The level of clarity and agreement we have on
the target customer segments / accounts we want to
focus on
• What:The value add of our integrated offerings into a
whole solution for our target customers, and
What: Capabilities How:Value Chain
Where: Customer
Segments/Accounts
Brand
Owner
Partner
CORE
AUGMENTED
EXTENDED
CORE
AUGMENTED
EXTENDED
SERVICE &
SUPPORT
IMPLEMENTATION
SALES
MARKETING
PRODUCTS
SERVICE &
SUPPORT
IMPLEMENTATION
SALES
MARKETING
PRODUCTS
?
?
MARKET
DEVELOPMENT
?
DIVERSIFICATION
?
MARKET
PENETRATION
?
PRODUCT/SERVICE
DEVELOPMENT
?

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PARTNERSHIPVALUE CHAIN
The execution challenge begins with aligning the brand-
owner value chain stakeholders around the objectives of the
anticipated Go-To-Market initiatives and then securing their
commitment, willingness, and ability to deliver their part. This
is followed by securing alignment and commitment of the
partnership stakeholders across the value chain.
The stakeholders represent in effect those in the value chain
who take responsibility for the setting of objectives, the
allocation of resources, and commitment to timelines.
• Ensuring that the joint solution meets the customer
requirements
• Setting up and executing the joint lead generation
activities
• Enabling the sales forces to better acquire, develop,
and retain the targeted customers
• Providing the consulting and implementation skills
necessary to deliver the solutions the customers buy
• Securing the support and service capabilities required
to maintain and support the solutions across their
productive lives
SOLUTIONS MARKETING SALES INSTALLATION
SERVICE &
SUPPORT
The activities to secure stakeholder alignment need to be
highly effective in terms of effort-to-output and be executed
in a consistent and well governed“plan, do, check”manner.
Achieving the highest level of effective planning, execution,
and monitoring requires strong processes, focused
methods, and well calibrated tools. In short, it requires the
organizational and individual competencies to permit the
stakeholders to make their contributions in a timely, efficient,
and effective manner.

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CHAMP PROCESS
There exists a process that follows closely the rhythm of
business planning within your organization. If fact, the ideal
adoption and most productive leveraging of the processes,
methodologies, and tools are within the framework of your
planning and review cycle.
CHAMP is that process. It starts with the guidelines of the
corporate strategy that the company gives out prior to a
new financial year. The guidelines then flow into the review
and update of partner profiles. The next step is to align the
partnering strategy and create the partner business plans
from an internal perspective.
Upon internal review and approval, the partner business
plans are shared with the respective partners and are
developed into joint business plans, which then enter a cycle
of execution and review.
The company will, over the course of the financial year, track
the results of executing the partnering strategy. This in turn
leads into the new cycle of planning for the corporation.
CHAMP
Channels and Alliances
Management
Process
Complete CHAMP
Partner Profile
Conduct CHAMP
Partner Planning
Hold Internal
Reviews
Share Ideas
with Partner
Conduct CHAMP
Joint Planning
Implement
the Plan
Review
and Update

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• To build on this understanding, we then approach the
task of setting direction for incremental revenue by
aligning our growth initiatives with our partners. The
joint initiatives need to be prioritized and sized before
determining the joint channel model required for
success
• At this point we apply the planning methodology to
set the goal for the partnership and determine the
objectives and action plan that will generate revenue
• We then turn to the relationship and investment side of
the partnership to examine the level of the relationship
and the degree of sponsorship
• This leads to setting the relationship objectives,
strategy, and action plan
• Then it is time to articulate the value propositions,
which underpin the partnership
• Finally, it is time to determine the governance that will
apply to the partnership
THE IMPORTANCE OF ROLE
SEGMENTATION IN PARTNERING
As you may expect, there is no“one-size-fits-all”approach
here. Most companies segment the role of partner
management into different levels.TheTAS Group recognized
very early on that there are inherently different requirements
in managing a global partnership with a distributed team and
a partner manager covering a group of partners.
Typically, the portfolio is segmented into 3 broad categories:
• Strategic:Very large, corporately managed in a
1-to-1, few-to-1, or many-to-1 type of relationship.
The team will likely have a global, regional, and
local management structure for the partnership in
place. The challenge will be to manage a process of
alignment, execution, and governance across multiple
geographies and time zones through both the brand
owner and the partner organizations
• Mass Market partners:Typically smaller partners that
support lower end customers.Your company may have
a 1-to-many territory management type structure in
place
• In between those, you will have a 1-to-few mid-market
portfolio focus in place where 1 partner manager will
support a group of partners (usually between 5 and
20). The challenge is to maintain focus and objectivity
to ensure the appropriate allocation of time to pursue
growth
The CHAMP approach provides the components to apply the
consistent process, methods, and tools to capture information
and understand implications while setting the proper goals,
objectives, and courses of action.
• We begin by assessing the partnership’s fundamentals
to clarify why we both want the partnership, how to
define success, and what will be expected across the
value chain
• We then analyze the partner’s business to understand
the organization, their growth strategy, capabilities,
and sales model
Strategic
Alliances
Mid-Market
Partners
Mass Market
Partners
many : 1
1 : few
1 : many

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• We conclude this part with Proactive Engagement —
the approach we use to insure that the partners who
are creating revenue today — this year — are being
supported. We want to be‘proactive’in ensuring
the right support is given to the highest potential
opportunities
• We then take a look at and develop approaches to
address the unexpected requests that impact our
time. To do this, we create processes that work almost
on‘auto pilot’ to satisfy a good portion of those
unexpected requests, which frees us to work on those
high revenue generating opportunities. To do this, we:
-- Take a look at the nature of these requests and
where they come from to build a plan for acting on
them in a programmatic fashion
-- Enable us to satisfy the requests, while minimizing
our personal involvement
• Finally, we’ll look at how to carry on the process once
the PPM program is complete:
-- Completing and reviewing the plan
-- Sharing with the partners
-- Executing, checking and tuning
PARTNER PORTFOLIO
MANAGEMENT PROCESS
The Partner Portfolio Management (‘PPM’) process provides
the same benefits for managing mid-market partners in a
1-to-few role.
• We begin by assessing our partners
-- Place the various partners into different categories
so that we can allocate resources to each group of
partners based on revenue and potential for growth
-- Where we focus – and where we de-focus
• We then discuss and determine the various
approaches we can use to maximize the opportunity
in each category of partner while best using the
resources available to us
• There is a module on each of those approaches.
We’ll discuss the approach and then apply it to the
partners in each category. The first is Partner Account
Management—for our highest potential partners. This
approach is focused on developing our top partners so
we both can continue to generate high levels of results
over a long and sustained period of time
SUMMARY
We started out by looking at the challenges and
pressures impacting the generation of alignment and
the execution of strategy in partnerships.
We then outlined the benefits that accrue when you
get the alignment and execution right.
Then, we covered how you get there by following the
right process, either for your enterprise partners or a
portfolio of mid-tier partners.
If you wish to find out more, please contact us at info@
thetasgroup.com.

9. ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved.This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission ofTheTAS Group.