Een in ons gezin overbodig geworden Apple iMac stond klaar om verkocht te worden. Alleen moest er nog even een foto van gemaakt worden voordat hij Marktplaats op kon. Toen vroeg ik me af welke rol Twitter mogelijk kan spelen als direct verkoopkanaal voor dit soort goederen. Dus tijd om het uit te proberen, tenslotte is Twitter zeer laagdrempelig, het intypen van een dergelijke tweet kost nauwelijks moeite nog tijd. Het resultaat mag er zijn: 21 minuten later was de iMac verkocht!
Alliance development and implementation can be as simple as A, B, C—well, actually A to G. I’m sure you can handle the extra letters. Follow this easy guide when building your marketing alliances or any strategic alliances for that matter, and your chances of success will increase ten fold.
A. Assess yourself and or your organization through the traditional SWOT model; strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to determine your reasons for alliance development. You first have to be quite clear as to what core competencies you have to offer a potential partner. Similarly, you have to know what you need from a partner to seek the correct partner having the correct competencies. Without this clarity, your chance of success is miniscule.
B. Be sure about your partner. This is where so many alliance development novices go wrong. After the assessment of your potential partner’s competencies, now comes the necessary step in also determining their propensity to partnering. Just because another has a core competency that you need, there is no guarantee that they will willingly share it. Be smart, be sure!
C. Conduct a pre-alliance agreement workshop among both companies, including the people that will be acting as the alliance functionaries. Here is where most of the problems need to be hashed out before the agreement goes to the lawyers. The workshop process is designed to reveal gremlins, particularly in the areas of culture, relationship, cooperation, and logistics. This activity will minimize lawyer costs, conflict resolution costs and false-start costs.
D. Determine your alliance structure. This is where you determine how formal your alliance relationship will become. There is a range from a casual handshake relationship through the traditional strategic alliance to a joint venture. While structure can evolve over time, you are far better off to determine the correct structure for your alliance in the beginning.
E. Execute the agreement. This is where, as the saying goes, the rubber hits the pavement. This is where you put up your precious resources. This is where you craft the written agreement and sign on the dotted line. Yes, you must have a written agreement outlining who is responsible for what. Who owns what and how conflict is to be handled. This is where you make a commitment to your partner.
F. Fuel the implementation fire. Getting your alliance from paper to activity requires plenty of fuel from both partners in the form of hard resources, time, and mindshare. Fuel is the currency of alliance structure, implementation and long term success. You must be willing to use some of yours when engaging in alliance relationships of any type. To be very specific, fuel means:
- Time
- Effort
- Mindshare
- Competency
- Cash
- Supplies
- Equipment
- Human resources
G. Great results require measurement and management. Plenty of alliance management tools have been developed over the last decade and they are available to you today. Some of the very important alliance measurement and management tools include:
- Alliance managers
- Joint planning
- Intranet
- Joint evaluation tools
- Individual evaluation methods
- Alliance success metrics
- Corporate alliance department
- Employee alliance deployment, generally full-time
To access helpful additional information from Ed Rigsbee at no charge, please visit www.rigsbee.com/downloadaccess.htm.
Copyright © 2010 Ed Rigsbee
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Ed Rigsbee, Certified Speaking Professional, travels internationally to deliver keynote presentations and workshops on effective and profitable alliance and partnering relationships. In addition to serving as the president of Rigsbee Research Consulting Group, Ed also serves as the CEO and Executive Director of a (501 c 3) public, non-profit charity. Ed has authored three books and over 1,500 articles to help organizations to take full advantage of their potential. While Ed has been fumbling, bumbling, and stumbling his way through the organizational mazes of for-profits and non-profits for over four decades, he has been an observer, researcher, and teacher; helping organizations of all sizes to build successful internal and external collaborative relationships. Contact Ed, get additional (no charge) resources, sign up for his complimentary weekly Effective Executive eLetter, or to view Ed’s videos, please visit www.Rigsbee.com
I wrote about The Alliance Conversation before and am now reaching the point where the project is open for participants and the process of scheduling interviews is in full swing.
A little background:
The Alliance Conversation – a conversation series to learn from the experts.
Suppose you are a small to mid sized business owner and see the signs that may point to the fact that the economy is slowly picking up again. You are looking for ways to grow your business and realize that the old fashioned ways of organically growing may not necessary be the most beneficial ways of growing your organization in 2010. Time to team up with others and explore the area of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships as an effective way to grow your business.
The Alliance Conversation is a project aimed at small to mid sized business owners with the aim to provide a resource with easy access for them to learn about Strategic Alliances and Partnerships.
At first, starting February 2010, The Alliance Conversation will provide an audio channel that will bring conversations with people who have first hand experience with Alliances. The conversation will bring their stories, allow to learn from their experiences, successes and lessons learned, all packed in a free weekly 20 – 25 minute podcast.
Secondly, later in 2010, a book will be published bundling the conversations and lessons learned in an easy accessible format.
People I am looking for:
When you are experienced in Alliances and Partnerships and interested to participate in the project please send me a message.
Too frequently business people get confused as to the end game. They get derailed into thinking it is the conduit that they want rather than what the conduit delivers. The quintessential story about the ¼ drill; where as one buys the drill for what the drill will get them—a ¼ hole in something
Alliances are essentially the same; they just come with more complex instructions. You develop an alliance for what the new entity can do for you and your business. The key here is to remember that an alliance of any kind is not the end game but a conduit for receiving something you need.
Equal is an Unimportant Concept
Alliances done well, will deliver the needed value to all participants. I’m not saying that the value will always be equal—it rarely is. However, if all parties are getting the value they need, than equal is an unimportant concept. What is important for alliance success is that the alliance delivers the unique and special value that generally would not be available through solo effort.
How to Survive Down Times
Article after article, expert after expert suggest lowering costs and hunkering down. Wow, what good will that do? The answer is knocking on doors—literally, or figuratively. How did you start your business? You knocked on doors. How will you emerge from crummy economic times? Positioned as an industry leader or innovator, or as just another player? Just another player is not a great position from which to emerge.
Knocking on Doors
This can be taken literally or as a metaphor for business development. Most large company alliances are generated through the business development silos in their organizations then quickly handed over to the alliance management silo. The point is that you cannot hunker in and cocoon, but rather must venture out into that big bad, mean, business of cold calling and business development. Alliance relationships are a great conduit for business development. And you just might have to knock on doors to get your next alliance partner.
Delivering/Receiving Value
The end game for any alliance is to deliver value to its participants. This is done through a seven step process:
- Monitor
- Educate
- Select Alliance Type
- Organize
- Agreement
- Implementation
- Maintenance
Compare a healthy alliance to healthy arteries. If these above steps are carefully followed the alliance built, will he a healthy conduit for value delivery—opposite that of arteries clogged up with cholesterol provided deposits that inhibit healthy blood flow. As mentioned earlier, the value each alliance participant receives does not necessarily have to be equal, but should be commensurate with the assets/resources contributed to the alliance.
When you decide to knock on doors and develop alliances that you believe will deliver value to your organization; keep in mind that what you really want is not the alliance but the value it delivers to your organization. Develop a strong conduit that will not collapse on itself and slippery enough (flexibility) to keep harmful deposits from building up, thereby inhibiting the value delivery that all participants must receive.
To access helpful additional information from Ed Rigsbee at no charge, please visit www.rigsbee.com/downloadaccess.htm.
Copyright © 2010 Ed Rigsbee
# # # # #
Ed Rigsbee, Certified Speaking Professional, travels internationally to deliver keynote presentations and workshops on effective and profitable alliance and partnering relationships. In addition to serving as the president of Rigsbee Research Consulting Group, Ed also serves as the CEO and Executive Director of a (501 c 3) public, non-profit charity. Ed has authored three books and over 1,500 articles to help organizations to take full advantage of their potential. While Ed has been fumbling, bumbling, and stumbling his way through the organizational mazes of for-profits and non-profits for over four decades, he has been an observer, researcher, and teacher; helping organizations of all sizes to build successful internal and external collaborative relationships. Contact Ed, get additional (no charge) resources, sign up for his complimentary weekly Effective Executive eLetter, or to view Ed’s videos, please visit www.Rigsbee.com
Earlier this week the Alliance Network BeNeLux was launched as a group on LinkedIn. The purpose of Alliance Network BeNeLux is to offer a platform for people in the BeNeLux area who are active in- or interested in the areas of alliance creation and collaboration or partnerships between organizations. Discussions & conversations can take place both in Dutch as in English.
You can join the group here.
Eerder deze week het Alliance Network BeNeLux was gelanceerd als groep op LinkedIn. Het doel van Alliance Network BeNeLux is een platform te bieden voor mensen in de BeNeLux die actief zijn in- dan wel geïnteresseerd zijn in de gebieden van alliantie ontwikkeling en samenwerken tussen organisaties. Voertaal van de discussies kan zowel in het Nederlands als Engels zijn.
Je kan je hier registreren voor de groep.
