Alliance Building: Selling To Various Stakeholders

As business development managers we all look out for potential business partners. In this pursuit we do enough research about the prospective partner, look out for relevant contacts and finally the discussions begin. If both the organizations have already done enough research and see the value addition then the marriage is easy and straight forward. There will be enough advocates or champions for each other on both the sides. But there are equal chances of it being a one sided interest. There can be two categories under this one sided affair - a. Did not hear about you earlier, but I am open for discussion b. Very high entry barriers for various reasons. This article focuses on the former.

Any business relation involves and affects multiple stake holders - CXO's, Sales teams, Technical support teams etc. Getting a buy in from each of them to kick start the relation is not easy. Reason is very simple. Different kinds of job functions have different KPI's, hence have different priorities. What excites a sales guy may not be of interest to a technical architect. Sadly but rightly, unless there is a consensus on the value add a relation can fetch, the decision maker doesn't get motivated enough to sign the relation. So developing new business alliances is not an easy task. It is paramount for the Alliances Manager to use the hard earned opportunity to discuss (sell) in the best possible way.
You may be very confident that your products will add a lot of value to the prospective partner. But how will the partners feel the same? How to effectively bridge this gap? Any organization is a bunch of individuals with personal and collective interests. Hence positioning the offerings in a right manner which will make them feel empowered is very critical.

• A sales person will have quotas to achieve. So when you are trying to convince sales teams show them how your offerings can help them achieve their quotas quickly. Understanding their quota mix can be very handy
• A technical architect may have challenges in building solutions and completing projects. Show how your offerings can enable him do it easily and quickly unlike his previous methods.Best way is to very crisply present the key differences between the 'As-is' process and  the 'To-be' process
• For senior management cost reduction, ways to enhance revenues and business expansion are always on top of the mind. Share some examples on how your offerings can beat competition, gain customer loyalty etc. Stories from other geographies and partnerships will prove invaluable

To be successful in this attempt enough home work needs to be done. Prepare and carry short and crisp material which will interest each of these various stakeholders, cite some metrics from similar relation else where. All of this should point towards one obvious yet golden parameter - Dollars earned or saved.

Despite all of this, if success still eludes then one quality which can surely help in long term is PERSISTENCE. Keep the relation warm as much as possible through simple things like courtesy calls, webinar invites, informal chats. Never know when the ice breaks!