5 Key Questions About Throwaway Partnerships

As the business community continues to struggle with global product shortages and disrupted supply chains, one thing is clear: without alliance, business, and channel partners, these organizations would likely be out of business today. It’s no secret that CEOs are looking to drive innovation, and over the last 10 years, that innovation has been tied to strategic partnerships. With the pandemic, this has never been more important as organizations work to increase partnership numbers. Despite that, the best practices and approaches to accomplishing this are often times still rudimentary and basic.

Impartner recently spoke with Mike Leonetti, President of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) and asked him five key questions around these challenges. For context, ASAP’s core mission is to provide organizations with a community, a series of best practices, and professional development tools that can help them engage and drive more strategic partnerships. More information can be found here.

Question 1: How can organizations close this gap between what the C-suite knows and understands today in regard to strategic partnerships and what they need to do moving forward?

Mike: The bottom line is that strategic partnership growth takes dedicated professionals and a practitioner that can help drive that professional. In many cases, that requires education and best practices. When you have a community supporting those activities, it increases the positive outcomes. In fact, research shows that 60% of strategic partnerships fail when they don’t follow best practices. Our research shows that 80% of organizations can be successful with strategic partnerships when involved with ASAP. That means being part of our community and using our educational and best-practice tools. This sense of community is critical to success today.

Question 2: We’ve seen good best practice and some poor ones, like throwaway partners. Can you talk more about this?

Mike: When we see the development of the ecosystem today, many think they can fill it with hundreds of partners and maybe not pay close attention to all of them. If partners don’t perform, the idea is you can simply discard them and move on. This is the idea of throwaway partnerships. But in reality, does this make sense? How much time and effort goes into finding these partners, to developing these relationships? How long before that return on investment begins to come? Then the question is, do you really want to start that over again? This approach can do extensive damage through a partner community. You can become known as having a lot of friction and churn, and as a brand that burns partner bridges. ASAP tries to identify these companies so that we can reach out to help them better understand this negative image perception. In many cases, they’re totally unaware of this reputation. Once they find out, they usually want to quickly correct it.

Question 3: Your organization speaks across all industries. Is there one industry that’s getting it right and who’s innovating?

Mike:  I think if you look, tech has been the leader for a long time. For example, I learned initially at Cisco. I was amazed at how they managed and ran their partnership programs. But today, it’s expanded across the board. For example, back in 2005 the patent cliff drove pharma to get better at partnerships – and they did. Over the last 5 years, one area that has really grown in this space is Fintech – they’ll be one to keep an eye on. They’re looking to learn and do better. 

Question 4: Innovation is happening at partner companies with new business models and partner experiences. How is the role of the vendor changing, given this evolution?

Mike: You have a total re-creation of the channel model over the last couple years. With everything moving to the cloud and software as a service (SaaS), the days of throwing money at partners to solve problems is over. As a result of these new technologies and models, resellers are working to reinvent themselves. Partnerships today can’t be run on spreadsheets, so the science of partnerships is changing. When you look at other functions like finance, HR, sales and more, these are all automated and have been for years. Partnerships have automated around the edge, but need more automation that helps drive information, data and reporting up to the C-suite. This allows them to make quick decisions and understand their top 5 partners, their weaknesses and strengths, who else they can add to the ecosystem, and more. The piece that’s critical is the information to make decisions and report on them. And, there’s a lot of innovation in this space, with tools like Impartner.

Question: How do you see strategic partnerships developing over the next 5 years?

Mike: I think as digital transformation takes hold on all parts of the organization, we’re going to see rapid acceleration in this space. People are increasingly partnering both inside and outside their company. As a result, all of the savvy organizations are going to become technology companies, so to speak. We’re also going to see this shifting burden and knowledge from long time industry veterans like myself to the new generation of channel leaders, which is really exciting – and vital. Organizations have learned that if they don’t get these up-and-comers involved in strategic partnerships, their future is uncertain.

Interested in hearing the entire discussion with ASAP? Check out the Lessons from the Edge podinar.