How can you incorporate strategic alliance training into your sales curriculum?

Alliance Basics: Educate on what strategic alliances are, their types, and their importance. Partner Selection: Train on how to identify and assess potential partners. Negotiation Skills: Include negotiation strategies and role-playing exercises. Value Alignment: Teach how to craft and communicate the value proposition of partnerships. Joint Solutions (joint ventures): Focus on creating joint sales strategies and solutions with partners. Sales Techniques: Cover cross-selling and upselling within alliances. Tools for Collaboration: Introduce CRM and other tools for managing partnership activities. Cultural Awareness (We know this in South Africa ): Emphasize understanding cultural differences in business practices.

Alliances must focus on raising the bar for the customer. Why does the customer need your alliance? Does the Alliance offer the customer exponential value beyond individual products? Is the Alliance altruistic with no backroom paybacks? Does the Alliance prevent offering the best solutions. What defines the beginning and the end of the Alliance? What privacy and data security issues are created? What is proper cross company marketing permissions documentation etc? What happens if the Alliance partners creates an issue that ruins their side of the cstomer relationship? Many may not realize their internal divisions i.e. home loans, banking, investments, commercial loans although under the same umbrella, they are in an Alliance.

For any alliance to be successful, it's critical to be crystal clear on the mutual expectations, as well as the desired outcomes from both sides - to prevent any misalignment and misunderstandings between both parties

A good way to start is to develop the areas where you hold a diametrically opposite view to your competition - your strategic difference. Exceptional strategy will then look to leverage the benefits of that throughout each area of your sales process.

Alliances are the way to fast track the business growth, which itself is a two way process and delicate path to create and walk upon. Few points to mention: 1) Set the common mutual goals and ambition, which keep everyone motivated and energetic 2) Clear set of Roles and Responsibilities: it includes the accountability within timelines. 3) Support: process should be smooth for easy and faster communication within quick timelines 4) Single Point of Contact: Adding face to name will fast track the discussions with proper review 5) Support: includes training, customer meetings, query handling, access to use the portals and others will contribute in success. Thank You

Handling Alliance Partnership is not an easy task as we are trying to marry two person which has different culture, background and more important how to make them align on the common goals. To have successful collaboration, one has to nurture the relationship which comes through 1) regular discovery session to solve the queries, understand each other pain points 2) training workshops to align with your products, services 3) Support system to handle their queries 4) Go To Market Approach: partner face challenges as journey continues, you will be part of problem solver. Thank You

Extremely important for leadership to clearly define how strategic alliances fit into the overall sales strategy & workflow. Keep in mind to: 1. Provide support and resources for the sales team to engage in strategic alliances. 2. Metric-defined alliance involvement should be tracked right from the early stages of the sales process. 3. Use real-world scenarios to highlight positive and negative business outcomes. 4. Establish a system of ongoing learning through webinars, workshops and periodic updates on the alliance growth and contribution. 5. Continuous feedback from sales on what's working and what isn't. 6. Special time-bound incentives for alliance-driven sales.

One of the most impactful ways to help address this is to audit the new hire training your team is doing for sales people as they come on board. You might be surprised or even shocked to hear what little or what incorrect information is being conveyed. Work hard to fix it. They need to hear from day one what these alliances can do for them. And why they matter.