Strategic alliances: the logo slide

Two executive sponsors meet at a conference and agree this makes sense. Two partner teams are assigned. A joint business plan is written with a number in it that neither side's field carries in quota. The kickoff is well attended. Then nobody opens the plan again, because the field teams on both sides are being paid to sell their own product to their own accounts, and nothing in the alliance changed that.

You have seen that one. So have I, from the inside.

An alliance is two big companies agreeing to go to market together. It is the most senior-sounding partnership on the list and the easiest one to fake, because everything that makes it look real, the joint press release, the co-branded webinar, the joint business plan, can be produced without a single customer being involved.

I have formed alliances with some of the largest media companies in the world. Some of them produced real revenue. Some produced a logo slide. The difference was never the size of the partner or the seniority of the sponsor. It was whether there was a shared customer at the center of it on day one.

Real alliances change that. The field teams share a target account list. Somebody's quota includes the joint number. And the executive sponsors show up more than once, which is the part that almost never survives contact with a calendar.

Three questions. Is there a shared customer, by name? Who is the executive sponsor on their side, and when did they last show up? What is the joint number this year, and whose quota is it in?

If the answers are "we are building the target list," "the SVP who signed it," and "it is in the business plan," you have a logo slide. It might still turn into something. It has not yet.

Thursday: standards bodies, the partnership with your competitors.

Which alliance on your slide has a shared customer you could name right now?

Part 11 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.