Strategic alliances and joint marketing partnerships can help companies quickly extend market reach, compete better, add more value to customers, and grow revenue for both partners. Companies are increasing the volume and pace of developing partnerships and launching new joint solutions to market. Once your company enters into a partnership agreement to launch a new joint solution to the market, operationalizing it quickly is no easy task.
Every Challenge is Multiplied When Working Across Company Boundaries
Taking your own company’s solution to market is hard enough. Identifying the right set of solutions and services from two or more companies, that together provide value and solve a customer’s problem, is a daunting task. You need to collaborate and communicate across company boundaries, teams and individuals; and deal with different schedules, workflows, processes, and systems within each company.
Once a joint solution has been identified, you have to create actionable assets to help your and your partners’ marketing and sales teams succeed. You often need active and timely participation from many people and teams across both companies to develop, review, and approve all these solution assets. You can easily spend weeks of effort with hundreds or thousands of emails, document shares, and conference calls by the time the solutions have been defined, agreed, and approved.
Once assets are developed and approved, your next challenge is getting them in front of marketing and sales teams at all companies involved in the partnership joint solutions. You have to distribute assets to the right people, and also make them easily accessible to on-demand requests.
Proven Strategies for Successful Joint Partner Solution Launches
Create a single source of truth
Fundamental to growing trust in a partnership is to create transparency to objectives, goals, funding commitments, assets, performance, etc. The best way to achieve transparency and develop trust is by leveraging technology to help you securely host and share information with all participants in one place — a single source of truth. By giving all participants equal opportunity to access information, contribute their knowledge and opinions, and gain transparency to timelines, deliverables, and ownership, you will make them feel enabled and respected. Transparency also creates peer pressure to honor mutually-agreed-to timelines and deliverables improving your chances of getting everything done on time and on budget.
Offload administrative burdens
Nothing wears down individuals and teams more than mundane administrative burdens like sending out reminders, reports, routine communications, approval requests, performance analysis, budget/expense reports, etc. This is an area where you can extract the most benefit from technology. By deploying a solution that can automate communications and alerts, approval workflows, data collection and reporting, you can spare teams of administrative burdens and help them focus efforts on more fun, creative, and productive work.
Measure consistently and evaluate performance objectively
Once you and your partners have agreed to joint performance goals and metrics, you need processes and tools that capture required data accurately from the right sources, and analyze and report on this data consistently. Here is where you can make a smart choice by deploying the right solution. If your system can connect directly with the data sources, and generate automatic analysis and reports, you can eliminate chaos, confusion and frustration for all. Partners can now access the same insights as you can, and collaborate to better manage outcomes vs. fighting over whose data and reports are superior!
WorkSpan’s New Solutions Module
Today, WorkSpan launched a new cloud-based solution, “WorkSpan Solutions” that helps solve these complex challenge of building and launching joint solutions with your partners. Our secure cloud platform lets all of your authorized team members across companies collaborate and share information in one place — one source of truth. WorkSpan Solutions makes it extremely easy for you and your partners to propose, fund, and create new solutions. Build and approve marketing assets to support the new solutions, and deploy those assets at exactly the right time for launch. WorkSpan Solutions also enables you and your partners to establish and report on mutually-agreed-on goals to let you focus on more important issues like driving revenue and winning in the market!To learn more, reach out to us at contact@workspan.com
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