Adventures in alliances land #4 – business velocity

I’ve attended several alliances conferences over the last month and the subject of measuring the benefits of the partnership came up in all of them.? The hypothesis could be summarised as ‘if we had cast iron data on the increased revenue growth and margin the alliance delivers, it would be easier and faster to get approval for incremental investment’.? Of course the room was filled with seasoned alliances people who have heaps of data and anecdotes on the businesses they run, but the debates really crystalised around the relative scarcity of independently verified studies on alliances to help manage internal challenges along the lines of ‘yes but, how do you know our business would not have grown than much anyway?’ or ‘great idea, but how do we know we don’t get a higher rate of return investing this money somewhere else?’.? Determined to unearth benefit benchmarks in the public domain I set off on a search….this is what I found…

I’ve been thinking, doing and writing about strategic alliances for more than 20 years.? When something in the alliances space catches my attention that I can share, I will – so if ecosystems, partnerships and alliances are your gig and your passion too I hope you’ll find these scribblings useful.? If you enjoy this article please follow me, subscribe, like, comment and repost.? My book on strategic alliances is here if you’d like to hear more adventures in alliances land.? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategic-Alliances-Fieldbook-Art-Agile/dp/103212900X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=strategic+alliances+fieldbook&qid=1691319592&sr=8-1

?Starting with my own material I touched on the point in chapter three of The Strategic Alliances Field book and published an excerpt in Newsletter 7.? This discussed the resource leverage of Professional Services and Technology partnerships and the widening of account coverage and expansion of go-to-market channel partnerships can offer. ?“At the time of writing, the sum of the employees of the four technology firms is 447,000, whilst for the Big 4 and the SI’s it is well over two million staff. In the technology firms, perhaps 25% of their staff will be in sales and other client facing roles building relationships and gathering insight into the accounts they are working on. The other staff will tend to be concentrated in research and development (R&D), product development, marketing, finance and less dedicated to clients. In the PS firms, closer to 75% of their staff will be chargeable consultants, typically spending three or four days a week in close contact with clients. This combination of a larger number of staff and a higher proportion of those staff having proximity with clients is a huge force multiplier for the alliance in terms of understanding the market and bringing relevant sales ideas to the accounts”.?Given this leverage ratio we'd expect to find increase growth rates and win rates for an alliance compared to going to market alone.

?Nancy Ridge and Norma Watenpaugh have penned an interesting paper ‘Partners are the Customer Experience’ which offers some specific numbers comparing co-selling results to one company going it alone.? Their research for the Enterprise segment indicated 181% bigger deal sizes, 40% higher win rates and 40% shorter sales cycles.?

Another piece from GTM Partners indicated finding 46% higher win rate for partner sourced and double the win rate for partner influenced opportunities, which I found interesting distinction.? Presumably the partner influenced win rate increase is twice the partner sourced because the two firms are more effective in combining joint capabilities where they are co-selling in the second scenario.? They also found 11% shorter sales cycles.

Drilling a bit deeper into a specific form of co-selling Roman Kirsanov has published a wealth of material on increased business velocity from partnering around hyperscaler market places.? His findings indicate between 80%-32% increase in average deal size depending on which hyperscaler it was, and 27% higher win rates.? He also indicated finding around 40% shorter sales cycles.?

So there are a few public domain sources of business velocity benchmarks, principally increased deal size (32%-181%), increased win rates (40%-99%) and shorter sales cycles (11%-40%) delivered by alliances.? What are the business velocity metrics you track, and what are the numbers?

Resources

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/strategic-alliances-fieldbook-newsletter-7-gavin-booth/?trackingId=ZFMnJSEGTCikTgi0tlVUQw%3D%3D

https://www.strategic-alliances.org/pxcx

https://app.hushly.com/runtime/view/Understanding%20Partner-Led%20Growth%20Report.pdf?guid=r40f61j0oge6ile37o8q0lr4gr

https://partnerinsight.substack.com/p/navigating-aws-marketplace-a-blueprint?utm_source=substack&publication_id=1334412&post_id=141587223&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1pw9vh&triedRedirect=true

https://partnerinsight.substack.com/p/inside-shopifys-cloud-marketplace?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1334412&post_id=141843878&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1pw9vh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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