As an alliance leader for your ISV, you know that you need to grow your mix of cloud, technology (ISV) and consulting partners. You open your inbox and are excited to find an introduction from your cloud partner manager at AWS, Azure or Google Cloud to one of the leading cloud consulting firms in your market. You want to make the most of the introduction so you get started preparing for your meeting. You prepare a deck about your software offering. You position the opportunities to drive services with your customers that you can’t deliver and how it’s a “Better Together” moment. Everyone is excited about the opportunity. You talk about next steps. Yet a month or two later nothing happens in terms of actual customer engagement. Your partner manager who made the introduction would love an update. You feel like you did all of the right things.
Sound familiar?
Here is the good news. Your partner manager wants to help you grow your business. Here is the bad news. You are doomed to repeat the scenario above if you don’t change your ways.
What should you do differently?
Growing an alliance ecosystem for an ISV is one of the hardest jobs in technology. When you get it right it creates an amazing flywheel for discovering new prospects and driving greater value to customers than you can do on your own. You have to influence your software engineering teams to build integrations with the cloud providers and other ISVs. You have to work with marketing and sales on building pipeline and execute on revenue goals. You have to make all of the related business cases and keep them updated. It’s a shadow CEO role when done right across sales, marketing, product, engineering and customer success.
With all of this, it’s easy to lose focus on the most important part of this equation. Your customers. But what is it about the customers that helps the business know which consulting partners to engage?
Your customers already have a consulting partner(s) they chose to help with their cloud strategy. This cloud consulting business is probably already using your product as part of their work with the customer. Do you or your sales teams ask your customers which consulting partners they are already using?
Which type of introduction to a new consulting partner is most likely to turn productive? One from a cloud company or one from your customer? Your customer, of course.
Now when the customer makes an introduction to a new cloud consulting partner, you have a much more important deck to put together. How are you helping existing joint customers? Where else can your sales teams work together to help even more customer together?
Now you aren’t wasting time. Good luck building your cloud alliance ecosystem guided by your customers.