What’s the best way to get started?  How does one decide where and with whom to work?  The most important starting point is understanding your key customer care-abouts.  That ensures that any joint selling initiative has the greatest relevance in the mind of the customer and also ensures increased partner credibility.  Ultimately any collaboration effort can be broken down into 3 major components:

1. Solution Selection - Prioritization of customer care abouts and alignment of solutions to those care abouts
2. Partner Selection - Select the most appropriate Route to Market partners from the partner ecosystem
3. Go to Market Planning with Partners - Determine the joint partner value proposition with the partner targeting the end customer

The following diagram illustrates some of the key steps:

Why Collaborate?
 
In the past few years, our research has shown a marked spike in the interest of partners in working with their peers.  Recent studies have shown that partners see a significant value in partnering, both from an economic perspective and from a capabilities perspective.  More than 74% of resellers saw collaboration with other partners as a significant factor in sourcing new customers, generating revenue, and winning larger projects.  Most partners regularly work with an average of 8 other partners, and 31% of their revenue comes via partnering (growing at 15% annually).  This feedback is even stronger as it relates to the recent economic challenges.  Our research also shows that one of the key hurdles in making collaboration happen is the lack of trust that exists between partners.  Partially for that reason IBM has created and IBM sponsored forum that ensures that you are working with some of the best companies in the business. 

The key to ROI is finding someone else you can work with to sell in new geographies, or sell a new solution.  The first step is picking someone with complementary skill sets.

Right now, every vendor has a channel community, whether they manage it actively or not. In many cases, that community is made up of the vendor’s own employees commenting on public sites about their programs and partners.

Vendors need to actively understand and manage their channel and partner communities, both managed and unmanaged. Key initiatives should include:

• Leverage existing partner communities as a foundation for a community strategy
• Take advantage of existing community market momentum and presence, and augment that momentum efficiently to meet goals
• Focus on sponsorship and nurturing, and only where necessary build out additional capabilities to fill gaps
• Create internal best practices and frameworks for community development and propagate them throughout the organization

It is important to focus beyond the immediate vendor partner portal. More often than not, the true community, and conversation, exists outside of the vendor’s own community/portal, and the mechanisms for influencing that conversation are varied and subtle.

We’re seeing a revolution taking place in the way best-in-class organizations sell solutions and work with their VARs and Solution Providers to drive scale and ROI. Companies are re-thinking the allocation of marketing resources and how to utilize marketing infrastructure to effectively scale how they go to market, particularly for the small and mid-market.

The goal is a pro-active, cooperative engagement that helps Solution Providers drive compelling marketing campaigns. The Solution Providers get significant value in this equation: Sophisticated marketing departments brought to bear to drive awareness and leads to their front door. The vendor benefits by making the Solution Provider more successful, and at the same time gains share of wallet over other vendors who are’nt pro-actively co-marketing with the Solution Provider.

HP’s efforts in this arena described by Michael Vizard of Channel Insider are a great example. In the work we’ve been doing with Cisco, we’ve seen significant increases in the number of qualified leads driven to the VARs and Solution Providers, reduced marketing costs, and increased share of wallet. They reported a 60% year-over-year improvement in their Small Business results after adopting the new vision and approach. I think this approach has three fundamental principles:

• Creating go to market strategies using a value-based framework
• Effectively scaling partner marketing and enablement campaigns utilizing tools that help systemize the process
• Constantly evolving partner/channel marketing and enablement campaigns to improve channel co-marketing results

More to come.