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Alliance Best Practice Playbook
Everyone talks about alliance best practice — few can put it into action. The Alliance Best Practice Playbook shows you how. Part One defines the 52 Common Success Factors behind commercially successful alliances; Part Two turns them into VST, a simple step-by-step process to grow revenue. Practical, systematic and built to be used — whether you manage one alliance or lead a whole partnering team. Download your copy and turn best practice into results.
Best Practice in Strategic Alliance Segmentation
Most organisations segment their channel partners by revenue or by training and certification bought — and in doing so overlook the strongest predictor of alliance success: relationship quality. This briefing introduces the TECP Model of Partner Segmentation, a practical four-tier framework — Transactional, Enhanced, Collaborative and Partnership — that helps you place each alliance where it truly belongs and match your effort to your intent. Drawing on worked examples including BT–Sun and Cognos–IBM, it shows why not every "strategic" partner deserves the same treatment, and how to grow the right relationships up the pyramid. Download the full briefing to benchmark your own portfolio.
O41 Managing Senior Executives Expectations Regarding Revenue Flow
An Alliance Best Practice Document exploring the question of how to manage senior executive expectations regarding the speed and amount of revenue flow from partners. This document is part of the O41 subset of CSF documents in the ABP best practice library.
Best Practices in Internal Alliance Management
Unlock the proven methods that transform internal alignment into a powerful driver of alliance success. This research report provides a complete play book for synchronising strategy, governance, incentives, and cross-functional execution so your alliances deliver real, repeatable value. Packed with actionable frameworks, role maps, communication tools, metrics, and a 180-day rollout plan, it shows exactly how to eliminate friction, accelerate decisions, and create true organisational commitment. Download it to equip your teams with the clarity, discipline, and collaboration capabilities needed to turn partnerships into a scalable growth engine.
The Future of Trust A new measure for enterprise performance - Deloitte Report
Understanding the Future of Trust requires a recognition of its present state. Trust has always been at the core of interpersonal relationships, but only recently has business started to recognize the impact that Trust
has on organizational outcomes. In essence, we’ve entered the Trust Age: a time where (mis)information is omnipresent, individual perceptions reign supreme, and digital security and data privacy are constantly threatened. In short, today, a myriad of stakeholders are holding organizations accountable for being trustworthy and, thus, Trust must evolve from merely a chance outcome to a strategic priority.
Believe it: Why trust may be the new driver of enterprise value - Deloitte Report
Organizations traditionally cultivate trust over time, earning it from different stakeholders as a byproduct of their consistency and transparency. But, in repositioning themselves to adapt to a shifting economic
environment, companies may discover the need to embed trust as part of their core foundation, which means fostering, deepening, and monitoring it as they would any other driver of enterprise value.
VST Justification Exec Summary - Mike Nevin
Research from alliance best practice over the last 20 years has revealed:
- Organisations that used a recognised process or methodology in their alliance
sales achieved greater degrees of success than those that did not.
- Organisations that used a recognised ‘best practice’ methodology achieved even
greater degrees of success.
- ‘Best practice’ was defined as a methodology built from multiple practitioners
using approaches and activities which had been proven to work in practice.
- The VST Alliance Sales Methodology is available as part of ABP Premium
Membership and costs £500.00 per person per year.
- Full training on the use of the methodology is included in membership
The Future Of Services Is Value Orchestration - Forrester Thought Paper
The old plan-build-run models of services with time-and-materials pricing are poorly aligned with the needs of a future-fit enterprise, where transformation is continuous and multidimensional and carries the uncertainty of the unknown. CIOs need a better model. There’s a new service paradigm taking shape that puts value at the center of the relationship and uses outcomes-based commercial models to create alignment. We call it a co-innovation partnership. A co-innovation partnership works when each
party takes on a new set of responsibilities with shared benefits.
Trust is a Critical Asset - Deloitte
The responsibilities of boards of directors continue to evolve and increase, particularly given the events of the past year. In addition to perennial topics such as strategy, succession, financial reporting, compliance, and culture, boards are experiencing broader demands on their oversight from expanding stakeholder and shareholder considerations; continuing challenges of the ongoing global pandemic and its aftermath; and addressing the changing role of the corporation in society at large on matters such as racial justice and climate. The growth in the number and complexity of board responsibilities is taking place in an environment of growing skepticism towards our various institutions.
Diversity strengthens competing teams - Julie Rowett - Royal Society of Open Science
How does the composition of a collection of individuals affect its outcome in competition with other collections of individuals? Assuming that individuals can be different, we develop a model to interpolate between individual-level interactions and collective-level consequences. Rooted in theoretical mathematics, the model is not constrained to any specific context. Potential applications include research,
education, sports, politics, ecology, agriculture, algorithms and finance. Our first main contribution is a game theoretic model that interpolates between the internal composition of an ensemble of individuals and the repercussions for the ensemble as a whole in competition with others. The second main contribution is the rigorous identification of all equilibrium points and strategies. These equilibria suggest a mechanistic underpinning for biological and physical systems to tend towards increasing diversity due to the strength it
imparts to the system in competition with others.
What to include in an IT partnership contract - Checklist by Future Processing
Every business relationship needs some agreements to be written down, so that both parties know what to expect and cooperate smoothly with the aim of fulfilling previously established goals. As the Future Processing’s Head of Business Development, I have had an opportunity to take part in a great amount of business negotiations. This checklist is the result of my experience - Dawid Przespolewski
Partnering Performance Best Practices - Executive Edition - By: Achieve Unite
This executive edition of our full e-book “Partnering Performance” will give you an overview of the key subjects in the book and share some top level knowledge on the topics most important to today’s channel executive:
• How to structure frameworks to support cloud and hybrid channels
• How to effectively ramp and onboard partners
• How to resource your program effectively and efficiently to best serve your partners
• How to go-to-market with your partners
Why trust should be one of your key performance indicators : Deloitte Report
Stories abound of companies losing trust with their stakeholders. Some involve privacy breaches, misinformation, or disinformation; others chronicle companies that simply failed to live up to their promises.
The stakes, in each case, are high: A recent Deloitte analysis found examples of three large global companies, each with a market cap of more than $10 billion, that lost 20% to 56% of their value—a total $70 billion loss—when they lost their stakeholders’ trust.
Typical Key Stakeholder Roles in a Strategic Alliance - Mike Nevin
Alliances and particularly strategic alliances typically exist at more than one level of management in the participating companies. ABP would argue that there are three key types of stakeholder in a strategic alliance. This short article describes them.
The 2021 CIO Agenda: Seize This Opportunity for Digital Business Acceleration - Gartner
Each year, Gartner conducts the world’s most influential CIO survey to track how CIOs and other senior IT leaders around the globe are balancing their strategic business, technical and management priorities. With these findings we generate the annual Gartner CIO Agenda Report, which presents survey results and case studies, plus expert analysis and insight - enabling CIOs to compare priorities and actions with global peers, and glimpse what the future may hold.
From Supply Chain to Value Chain: Collaboration is the Key - by Frank Wilhelm, International Supply Chain Solutions
The art of successfully managing a supply chain for optimum value continues to be one of the most talked about, yet elusive, goals in the world of manufacturing. When it comes to supply chain, manufacturers are too often dazzled by "flavorof-the-month" management philosophies and dismayed by the sheer number of
supply chain technology solutions out there. The goal of this article is to cut through the confusion, define value chain and explain its impact on growth oriented companies.
Ecosystems for Ecosystems : How Business Ecosystems Can Enable Collective Action Against Climate Change - Boston Consulting Group
The orchestrators of today’s largest technology-enabled business ecosystems are uniquely positioned to help bring about collective environmental action. Human societies have an outstanding ability to solve complex collective action problems, and for the past 400 years they have done so primarily through the mechanism of the nation-state. However, states have found it especially challenging to tackle collective action problems that are global in scale. The answer may lie in cross sector cross company business ecosystems.
Collaboration in Supply Chain Management: A Resilience Perspective - Ruth Banomyong, Thammasat Business School
Present day supply chains are global by becoming longer but also more fragile. Supply chains are always
faced with constant cost pressures as customers often demand higher service levels without an increase
in price. Firms often lack visibility of what is happening within their supply chains. Global supply chains
require sophisticated abilities to monitor, report, adjust to, and analyse the flow of events that occur. In
order to be able to manage such events, collaboration with partners and suppliers of products and
services is needed to transform from a “plan and execute” to a “sense and respond” way of operating.
The wake-up call: Building supply chain resilience in consumer products and retail for a post-COVID world - Capgemini Research Institute
The basic supply and demand foundations of the consumer products and retail (CPR) sector has been massively shaken by the pandemic. Take digital acceleration. Online sales are expected to increase at their fastest rate in 12 years, accounting for 20% of all retail purchases in 2020. Grocery stores, pharmacies, and other essential retail outlets ran out of stock as the crisis first hit, with consumers stocking up on staples, from toilet paper to hand sanitizers.
Alliance Automation Report from Forrester
Channel professionals want to talk about expanding their partner programs and building broad ecosystems, but the truth is that many of their basic program and channel management processes are still painfully manual and error prone. Before accelerating their channel program, they need to apply basic automation technologies to get their front- and back-end systems to a future-ready state.
Invest In Partnerships To Drive Growth And Competitive Advantage - Forrester Research
Enterprises and brands have traditionally focused on growth through sales and marketing optimization. While historically successful, enterprises are increasing their focus on growth through partnerships to meet and exceed future growth goals. As partnerships become increasingly crucial to revenue growth, organizations must develop an operational strategy and leverage the correct channel tools and organizational best practices to ensure partnership success.
Earn Your Place In The Platform Economy - Forrester Report
Platform businesses reshape industries by dramatically improving the economics of integration and service delivery. You can participate in a platform economy by exposing capabilities via APIs and adopting partners' platforms. But to lead, digital business leaders must build services that customers and suppliers embed into their operations. We interviewed 33 platform businesses, including Dropbox, General Electric, PayPal, and SupplyOn, to find out how. The answer? Start with a real customer problem, not ecosystem envy.
When courtships fail: The antecedents of failure in strategic alliances between startups and incumbents - Dennis Gan, University of Oslo, Norway and Steffen Korsgaard, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
This study explores the antecedents of alliance failure between incumbents and startups by shedding light on the ex ante conditions that initiated the alliances, the in situ conditions that caused the alliance failures, and the ex post conditions of the outcomes. We conducted a qualitative, multiple case-study analysis of four failed alliances in a northern European context based on interviews with executives from the incumbents, startups, and incubators involved. Our findings indicate that the promise of resource complementarity between incumbents and startups does not warrant the success of strategic alliances. Finally, we explore the implications of our findings and propose how incumbents and startups can collaborate better in future alliances.
Why Trust may Be the New Driver of Enterprise value
Organizations traditionally cultivate trust over time, earning it from different stakeholders as a byproduct of their consistency
and transparency. But, in repositioning themselves to adapt to a shifting economic environment, companies may discover
the need to embed trust as part of their core foundation, which means fostering, deepening, and monitoring it as they would any other driver of enterprise value.
Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition - James F Moore
The seminal paper on ecosystem development from the 'godfather' of ecosystem thinking. Successful businesses are those that evolve rapidly and effectively. Yet innovative businesses can’t evolve in a vacuum. They must attract resources of all sorts, drawing in capital, partners, suppliers, and customers to create cooperative networks. Much has been written about such networks, under the rubric of strategic alliances, virtual organizations, and the like. But these frameworks provide little systematic assistance for managers who seek to understand the underlying strategic logic of change. Even fewer of these theories help executives anticipate the managerial challenges of nurturing the complex business communities that bring innovations to market.
Make or Break Metrics - 20 KPIs Every Growing Business Should Track - Oracle NetSuite Thought Paper
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable business metrics that track and measure an organisation’s progress toward its strategic objectives. More than just numbers, KPIs tell a story about how well a company is performing. Understanding KPIs as they relate to your industry, company and even separate departments within a company is essential for any growing business.
Why Trust Should Be One of Your KPIs
Many C-suite executives, including CFOs, recognize the need to build or rebuild trust in their organizations. However, they often
struggle to understand exactly how trust can be defined, managed, and measured. Indeed, trust is commonly considered an abstract or even nebulous concept, and some organizations don’t prioritize trust or treat it with the same focus and urgency as they do other business priorities. But the potential benefits for those companies that are considered trustworthy can be significant. Recent research suggests that these companies can outperform the S&P 500 by levels as high as 30% to 50%.
The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2020
Supply chain leaders exhibit adaptability and resiliency, especially during times of disruption. The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 highlights companies possessing these and other differentiating capabilities, and provides people, process and technology insights that CSCOs can use to compete.
The CEO Imperative: How mastering ecosystems transforms performance
A growing number of companies across geographies and sectors are making ecosystem business models a strategic imperative to drive stakeholder value. Those companies that exhibit leading practices in their management and execution of ecosystem business models outperform those that do not. Companies effectively managing ecosystem business models report benefits to innovation and operational efficiencies both within their organization and the market.
Collaborative Practices of High-Performing Teams
Increasingly, organizations rely on networks of agile teams to get work done. Volatile global markets, digital
disruption, and competition for talent have forced companies to accelerate innovation, adapt rapidly to sudden shifts in market conditions, and stay closer than ever to local customers. In response, companies are forming looser, more fluid networks of empowered teams that communicate and coordinate activities in dynamic ways. Research conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity finds that 40% of high-performance organizations―those that excel in revenue growth, profitability, and market share over a 5-year time horizon―are shifting from traditional functions to more cross-functional project/team-based work to a “high or very high degree.”
Building high impact partner ecosystems - Accenture Thought Paper
We are all in uncharted waters today: a pandemic and economic upheaval, coupled with rapid technology change, rising customer expectations and more. The impact of these developments has rippled
throughout the world of commerce, including business relationships. One notable relationship change is that between large technology providers and the strategic partners they work with. It’s an important topic, because many (if not most) products and services that customers purchase involve partnerships of one kind or another. This paper explores the changing expectations of technology providers and partners, and offers practical guidance on how both parties can work together more effectively.
How boards are nurturing and measuring stakeholder trust - Deloitte Insights Magazine Issue 31
In the Deloitte Global Boardroom Program’s latest Frontier survey, both board members and executives agree trust is important and think it’s their responsibility. But few include stakeholder trust-building in their corporate governance strategy. What’s stopping them?
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