Alliance Management in Post-Covid Times
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our world and dramatically impacted most every aspect of our lives and many of these changes will be permanent. To adjust, we’ve had to rapidly transform activities at home, school, and work. Technology has been a significant enabler to this transformation by providing the capability to work, learn, and collaborate virtually.
Undoubtedly, the most impactful behavioral consequence of the pandemic is the requirement for “social distancing”. This change is causing many workers to be displaced and will likely result in demand for new skills in areas such as health care, distribution, transportation, cybersecurity, and analytics just to name a few. Major job displacements largely due to required social distancing are happening in retail, travel, leisure, entertainment, and food and beverage services.
Businesses are trying to do everything they can to sustain their revenues during this extremely difficult time. Gone, for the foreseeable future, are industry focused summits, face-to-face sales calls, sales conferences, and in person training seminars. Luckily, advances in technology have significantly enabled the new paradigm of work from home and remote learning and as a result videoconferencing, collaboration platforms and file sharing technologies are exploding. The result of all this change is that companies will have to transform their sales processes which will also have a direct impact on how they relate with their alliance partners.
Business processes are evolving as companies remain focused on sustaining their revenues while repositioning their workforce and transforming their customer and partner interactions. Artificial Intelligence and robotics are being applied to business processes to minimize personal interactions. However, not all businesses can support a remote “work from home/virtual model” or benefit from process automation. Many individuals from these businesses have been temporarily been furloughed with the likelihood of being permanently displaced.
Despite the turmoil, many corporations have adopted and weathered the storm quite well. These businesses have found ways to protect their revenue streams while positioning their companies for a return to growth. Executives are now focusing on transforming for the future and adopting new winning strategies.
Some of the increased focus includes shifting sales and customer service processes while leveraging technology where possible. According to recent studies we should expect companies to:
Provide customers with a more responsive and agile customer experience
Establish cross-functional teams for sales and sales support and increase digitization with remote tools
Digitize marketing, increase personalization, and adopt more flexible product and service pricing
Embrace the trend toward full scale e-commerce, a digital sales model and recognize the shift toward inside sales
Position sales teams to engage with customers and partners virtually
As companies shift their sales and marketing teams to work virtually and embrace digital sales and marketing, there will be a downstream impact on partner relationships. With an increased focused on digitized sales and marketing, and as inside sales and customers are getting accustomed to the virtual business model, leveraging partners will be critical to success. A Pre-Covid study suggests that many CEO’s expect over 40% of their company‘s annual revenue to come from alliance and partner relationships. This trend and dependency will only grow Post-Covid.. However, ensuring these relationships are successful will require careful orchestration, discipline, collaboration, and increased leverage of tools and technology.
Trust is an essential element in building and nurturing strategic collaborative relationships. Traditionally, trust takes time to build and is often established through social interaction. For the foreseeable future, business-related interactions will remain virtual and conferences, summits, and trade shows will be tech-enabled collaborations. We must recognize that the bonds we traditionally built with our business partners will now have to developed through the newly created virtual sales, marketing, and partner platforms. This is a new way of relationship building for many of us and must be carefully and proactively managed if organizations expect their strategic relationships to prosper and succeed.
Alliances and partnerships will need to undergo a transformation similar to the changes that sales and marketing functions are undergoing right now! At a minimum, alliance partners will need to:
Embrace a virtual model for partnering leveraging a tech-enabled platform for partners to share ideas, marketing materials, analytics, proposals, training
Replace the traditional social interactions (dinners, face-to-face meetings, sales events) and learn to bond and build trust through social media, virtual collaboration and digital sales and marketing, (joint training, panel discussions, webinars etc.)
Prioritize joint opportunities by sharpening focus on the customer and providing a distinct value proposition by leveraging the digitized assets of the partnership.
Establish clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals and track progress with dashboard reporting
Establish routine virtual cadence meetings for collaboration and accountability