The Battle for Partner Mindshare

Key Takeaways

• The battle for partner mindshare has increased exponentially in the last 4 years. Partner mindshare was always important but now more than ever before partners have a greater choice in who they partner with. It is no longer a case of partner selection rather more of partner seduction.
• Now more than ever the alliance relationship matters more than the alliance revenue, because alliance revenue relies on deals which come and go, but an increase in the alliance relationship means that the source of the deals is enhanced. (Think about the tale of the goose that laid golden eggs, the goose is the alliance relationship the golden eggs are the deals that the alliance delivers!).
• The leading partnering organizations are now taking steps to actively measure partner mindshare on a regular basis; typically, through partner healthchecks conducted every 12 months or so. In many cases organizations are using external help to ensure objectivity and consistency of scoring.
• However, the drawback to alliance healthchecks is that they are subjective, meaning that you can measure the performance of partner X as compared with partner Y but you cant measure how partner X and partner Y score against your key competitors.
• Partner mindshare is a leading rather than a lagging metric. ABP has been benchmarking alliance relationships for 22 years and one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that if you increase partner mindshare you will increase partner revenue. It has been a consistent feature in the 850+ assessments we have done over the years.

What every alliance sales professional knows is that there is currently a huge battle going on for partner mindshare. #Accenture was probably the first organization to publicly acknowledge the battle back in 2021 in a strategy paper called Building High Impact Partner Ecosystems (https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insights/high-tech/future-partner-relationship) the authors Dawn Anderson Nicole Truesdale Karla Gallardo Ron Ref Michael Heald and Olivier Jankelovics had this to say at the time:

77 percent of the partners we surveyed stated that they have more provider choices than three years ago. That means providers cannot take the relationship for granted. They need to win a fiercer competition for partner mindshare.

An Enduring Problem - The Need to Attract Partners

This battle for partner mindshare is an enduring problem. It has been around since the dawn of the alliance age which is generally regarded as the latter part of the 20th century. Whether you are a global systems integrator (GSI) looking to attract the new flood of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software companies or you are a software company looking to attract GSIs to embed your software in their offerings. In either case you need to attract the most desirable partners in the market to work with you.

But more than just work with you, they have to recommend you ahead of your competition. Because let's face it the prime purpose of alliances in the high tech industry is to convince partners to bring you leads which turn into opportunities which turn into customer deals.

How Do You Measure Partner Mindshare?

However, there is a problem, which is 'How do you measure partner mindshare?'. If you ask your partners 'Are we front of mind in your organization ahead of our competitors?'. The likelihood is that you will get a 'Yes' answer. But how do you know they are not giving the same answer to your competitors? And if you cant adequately and objectively measure partner mindshare how can you improve it?

Typically, in the past organizations have used lagging indictors to tell them whether a partner favours them or not. The most obvious lagging indicator being the amount of business that they have done with each other. But there are others such as : the number of joint bids undertaken, the number of product certifications one partner or the other has achieved the number of joint events organized and funded by both sides.

The problem with all these measures are:

1. They are all lagging indicators, what is needed is a leading indicator. In other words, measuring something which leads to increased business introductions from the partner.
2. The second problem is that they are all subjective rather than objective. For example, Accenture can measure the partner mindshare of ServiceNow (for example) in the UK and compare it to the same partner in France, Germany, Nordics, or the USA. But they cant measure how their partner mindshare compares to that of ServiceNow with their major competitors like Capgemini, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, DXC, Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG.

What is needed is an objective set of measures organizations can use to understand whether they are winning the partner mindshare war.

How Alliance Best Practice Ltd (ABP) Can Help

This is where ABP can help. We have been benchmarking alliance relationships for 22 years and in that time we have been consistently measuring partner mindshare in an objective and coherent way using 25 best practice measures in five key categories: Commercial, Technical, Strategic, Cultural and Operational. In the last year alone for example we have conducted alliance assessments with the following companies: Accenture, Adobe, Alteryx, Apptio, Automation Anywhere, AWS, Blue Prism, Capgemini, Cisco, Cloud Software Group, Cloudera, CommerceTools, Coupa, Dassault Google, IBM Immersive Labs, Informatica, Fujitsu, KPMG, Microsoft, NetApp, NTT Data, Nutanix, Oracle, Palantir, Pegasystems, Pure Storage, Qlik, Red Hat, Sailpoint, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Software AG, Splunk, Spryker, UiPath and Workday.

The ABP system measures 25 aspects of partner mindshare and scores them from 0-100 in a range that typically scores as follows: 0-25 = Low, 25-50 = Medium, 50-75 = Good and 75-100 = Outstanding. In each case we have been able to show that increasing partner mindshare directly leads to an increase in partner revenue. In other words partner mindshare is a leading rather than a lagging indictor.

ABP has a vast database of alliance assessments that it has conducted over the last 22 years, but more importantly we are adding to that database on a constant and ongoing basis. As new technologies and methodologies appear we add those newly emerging partners and partnerships into the databse. This gives us a unique insight into the ever evolving nature of the relationship that Accenture calls the Provider and Partner relationship. Provider meaning a provider of services and partner meaning those technology companies that partner with them to provide business solutions to clients.

Next Steps

If you would like to know more about how to create increased partner mindshare or if you would like a partner mindshare assessment with a chosen partner feel free to contact us at [email protected] or check out our alliance best practice downloads here: https://www.alliancebestpractice.co.uk/