Watch Video of Deb Barnard on staying top of mind – 2:00
The better I understand the customer and the current environment we are selling into, the better we can begin to choose the right partners to align to my personal goals and needs.
Knowledge
Who are the decision-makers? What are the projects? What is the political landscape? Who are some of the key vendors? Who are the major influencers?
Access
Who are the relationships that are in the account? How do I gain access to a line-of-business leader? How do I gain access at the executive level? I need all of those things to frame up a strategy to go win in the account.
Who are the vendors that my end-customer is buying from? Who are the vendors that are influencing decisions inside my organization? It’s very important to know who the advisors, consulting firms, hyperscalers, software companies, etc., are that the end-customer is working with. There can be hundreds if not thousands of vendors that an organization works with. Your ability to understand what that ecosystem looks like helps you begin to navigate the waters.
Based on the knowledge of the market and the customers, you begin to map that back to the partners that we have. When you begin to match your partner and vendor maps to see if you have a relationship that will help that particular objective.
The treasure map is your strategically aligned plan with partners that going to get you to the goals that you are trying to achieve. The intersections of the Vendor and Partner Maps will give you a list of what partners you need to be looking at. Finally, you prioritize the partners that will best achieve the objectives. Of the 50, 5 of them you are going to go deep and wide with and build a deep relationship with them.
Watch Video of Deb Barnard on gaining executive commitment – 1:32
Align the impact to the stakeholders
You have to put some structured routines in place where stakeholders are agreeing on what the important areas we should focus on are. So when you do it, it has the greatest impact.
You need to have a balanced approach and be aligned across all horizons.
Core – 70%
What activities are at that is at the center of what we do and how can partners help us do it even better?
Incremental – 20%
How can we make subtle changes that help us improve and introduce new things to the market?
Transformational – 10%
What innovations can we put in place that put us in a new category or change the landscape?
