In my head, I'm starting to sound like a broken record. I realize that it's not true. Like every other human being on the planet, when you are deeply engrossed in something, it fills your thoughts continuously. To me, things like using Alternative Revenue Streams to grow your business seems obvious, but I have to remember that not everyone has heard the message or thinks of it the way I do.   I had a conversation with several CROs this week, and one of the things that came up in conversation was the notion of utilizing channels to create exponential growth and to help grow their business. For these CROs (thanks for letting me use you in this post), it was an A-ha moment. "Yes, of course, use other channels to market, why didn't I think of that?!?" Up to now, these individuals have only focused on direct sales as a path to customers, and our recent mention of Alternative Revenue Streams caught their attention enough to get on a phone call.   So it dawned on me. A...

  Throughout my career in partnerships, I have had the good fortune to witness some great partner programs, some real works of art! But for every well-executed plan, I have seen dozens of mediocre, poorly run programs, and many that have just outright failed. This bothers me. Running partnerships is hard work, but seriously, why is the profession I have chosen to be involved in so full of train wrecks? The subject has caused me to sit back and think of why some programs succeed and why some fail. When I ask CEOs and CROs why their partner program failed, they point to many factors, both internally and externally. Common items that I hear: we don't have a partner culture, we had the wrong partners, sales never adopted the model, we tried it for six months and made no progress and on and on and on... However, when I step back, partnership programs fail from one of two directions. They either have too little or too much experience leading it. Let me explain.   A majority of ...

  I had a recent discussion with a start-up CRO. We were talking about his company and their selling strategies. One of the first questions I asked was, "How do you sell to your customers?" A simple question for sure. I intended to find out all the techniques used to get a customer to buy their products. As part of our focus at PartneReady, we try to find out different methods to drive alternative revenue streams, so it was a natural question. The CRO went into great detail about how his team sells. As I was listening intently, I started thinking, "Well, that's the method, but why?" Then it hit me. I started with the wrong question. As part of my bag of tricks as a partner professional, my first phase in creating a partner strategy is a proprietary method of discovery that I call the "Value Chain of the Customer." In the Value Chain method, the first steps are to ask three questions: 1) To do his/her job, what does the product & service ecosystem l...