Best Practices in Alliance Restructuring

Alliance Best Practice Ltd (ABP) has been commissioned to investigate best practices in alliance restructuring. The remainder of this newsletter explains Why? and How?

Business Problem

Many organisations are currently reorganizing and restructuring their alliance teams.?This typically involves some degree of cost cutting and downsizing. The challenge for almost all organisations (regardless of size) is: ‘How to downsize without affecting alliance partner performance’. There is an additional challenge which is that in downsizing their teams many organisations are combining alliance type relationships with channel type relationships and hoping to manage both with a common process. This creates significant problems for alliance executives struggling to maintain or even increase alliance results with significantly less resources.

Research Objectives

Alliance Best Practice Ltd (ABP) has agreed to conduct research into this area with the following objectives:

• To establish a maximum degree of cost cutting possible without affecting partner performance.
• To investigate the feasibility of combining alliances with other types of collaborative partnership relationships and managing the enlarged group of partners in a common way.
• To discover best practices in avoiding channel conflict resulting from restructuring activities.
• To establish best practices in developing alliance incentives for team members and partners.
• To investigate best practices in partner tiering methodologies.

Research Methodology

ABP will use its proven best practice benchmarking process for this exercise as follows:

• Identify key questions for research candidates to answer.
• Identify Heads of alliance / partnership functions in SaaS type companies with 1,000 – 5,000 employees that have recently restructured resulting in a material downsizing of their alliance / partnership function.
• Establish a benchmarking scoring system reflecting relative answers to each question.
• Invite suitable members of the global alliance best practice community to contribute
• Interview all candidates for 30 minutes using the identified questions.
• Compile all research answers in a final anonymized report.
• Share the report with all contributors for free.

?Next Steps

If you would like to take part in the research identified above, please contact us in the strictest confidence at [email protected]