WorkSpan: drive innovation through ecosystems
The age of digital disruption has changed how companies and customers interact. Traditional go-to-market strategies are no longer enough to keep businesses—even those in the Fortune 500—competitive or afloat. Building a strong ecosystem of partners is key to staying on top. IDC recently published a report on ecosystems in which they estimate 50% of the Global 2000 will have formed alliances with their technology partners by 2021.Ecosystems are becoming an essential part of end-users’ technology and services sourcing process. WorkSpan is the underlying engine that drives thriving, agile ecosystems by unifying marketing and sales processes in one system, streamlining engagement and collaboration, and providing powerful reporting.
Say goodbye to ecosystem roadblocks
Until now, strategic alliances haven’t had a dedicated solution for their work; they’ve had to resort to cumbersome spreadsheets and never-ending manual updates. Each partner uses a different system, making reconciliation a nightmare. This leads to lost opportunities, wasted budgets, inaccurate reporting—and ultimately lost revenue.In their report, IDC states, even though 53% of enterprise companies manage 20 or more alliances, 73% say ongoing management of alliances and ecosystems continues to be a challenge. Alliance leaders face constant pressure to show the value of partnerships, but slow rollouts and inconsistent or nonexistent status reporting and performance metrics threaten to dissolve even the most promising partnerships.
Ecosystems as a competitive advantage
WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud brings all your partners together to build, market, and sell with each other like never before. You can share sales plans and opportunities with your partners to accelerate and close deals and access accurate, live data to focus on high-performing solutions and campaigns. And, for the first time, you can connect with new partners and your broader ecosystem in a single, secure, cloud-based network.Manage your programs, joint pipeline, marketing plans, solutions portfolio and funds together with your partners, so everyone is on the same page. This makes your alliances what they should be—collaborative. After all, you’ve created partnerships for a reason, and with the barriers to a thriving ecosystem out of the way, you can unleash the unique skills and capabilities of your partner network.
Why WorkSpan’s approach works
WorkSpan is the first Ecosystem Cloud to connect with all partners in one place, bringing end-to-end processes and configurable workflows across companies and creating a shared system for multi-way partnering.This new approach to alliances builds trust with strategic partners, improves collaboration and engagement, and reduces time-consuming back and forth with partners, meaning decisions can be timely and actionable.And, as the market shifts and accelerates, WorkSpan gives partners greater agility to address changes and be the first to capitalize on opportunities. As a result, WorkSpan’s approach offers companies the ability to create a competitive market advantage.
What our customers are saying
“WorkSpan has become the go-to platform for all of our alliance teams. I feel like we can ‘out-partner’ our competitors now.” –Bret Dayley, IHV Alliance Marketing Lead, SUSE“We drastically reduced time spent on mundane coordination tasks, and instead doubled our field effectiveness and tripled our impact.” –Steve Asche, VP, Digital & Partner Marketing, Digital Enterprise Platform Group, SAP
IDC guidance for ecosystem leaders
IDC’s report unveils some surprising statistics about the power of ecosystems and offers ecosystem leaders—like you—three concrete steps to get started.Step 1: Evaluate your requirements and related gaps.Know what your key stakeholders expect and how your current ecosystem measures up.Step 2: Join and engage.Use WorkSpan to work faster, collaborate smarter, and capture opportunities.Step 3: Analyze and measure.Utilize available tools to evaluate your success, apply course-correction techniques and improve your decision-making.At WorkSpan, we are proud to be at the forefront of ecosystem disruption and innovation and provide our customers with a single, secure, cloud-based network to grow business and abundance with their partners.
Vishal is the Director of Content Marketing & Social Media and leads our Alliance Aces Community. He has been in marketing for 14+ years and writes about ecosystem cloud, alliance strategies, and digital transformation.
