Peter

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

Earlier this year I became a member of the International Business Club of the World Trade Center Almere Area (WTCAA). This business club offers a platform for business networking with quite an extensive program that includes company visits, informative sessions and international trade missions. A couple of months ago I was approached for an interview in Crossborder, the dual language magazine of WTCAA.  [click to continue…]

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

Earlier this year I became a member of the International Business Club of the World Trade Center Almere Area (WTCAA). This business club offers a platform for business networking with quite an extensive program that includes company visits, informative sessions and international trade missions. A couple of months ago I was approached for an interview in Crossborder, the dual language magazine of WTCAA.  [click to continue…]

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

Every professional should value the satisfaction of professional relationships. Relationships like alliances and strategic customer – supplier relationships. Often however we forget the importance of perception, the way of communicating and the management of expectations. Trust, openness, appreciation will be valued in a more positive way when the relationship is in a satisfactory state.

This is the basis for the Joint Engagement Strategy (JES), for which the foundation lies in the perception survey.

This survey consists of 17 statements that will be responded to in a timeframe of 7 – 9 minutes. The power of the survey is in the fact that the involved employees and those of your business partner will respond to exactly the same statements. Everyone will be asked to respond impulsively. Every survey will be reported back in a report that summarizes the state of the relationship in text and in a graphical way. This summary will be discussed in a joint evaluation.

In reality every evaluation will lead to points of improvement. These will be captured in an improvement plan that contains elements like approach, deliverables, responsibilities and the desired outcome. The improvement plan and the progress made will be discussed in the next evaluation. The survey and evaluation process in general runs 3 times a year.

Your satisfaction is under constant pressure. It is therefore important that the people responsible for the relationship will work with your partner in a joint team towards joint satisfaction. View satisfaction as a challenging team sport where it will be the goal to improve the measured values every time again.

In summary:

• 9 minutes, 17 statements in a joint survey
• Clear, short improvement plans as result of the joint evaluation
• A simple and repeating process with excellent results

Read more about the Joint Engagement Strategy and the perception survey.

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

Does your company have an alliance brand and how important is it for your organization to be recognized as an alliance brand?

Steve Steinhilbers book on strategic alliances was face down on my desk when some words on the back caught my eye. Even though I read the book and know Cisco is very focused on establishing alliances for the right reason I did not realize the size of the impact of alliances to Cisco yet. On the back of the book it was mentioned that Alliances deliver Cisco “a cumulative value of more than $4.5 billion annually in business impact”. That sounds impressive and as this little sentence triggered my interest I looked a little further. In the year the book was published (2008) Cisco had an annual turnover of nearly $40 billion. This means that more than 10% of that revenue is impacted by the alliances Cisco established. It is a significant part of Cisco’s revenue. I would argue that Cisco is an alliance brand.

That triggers a question to define what an alliance brand is. An alliance brand is a brand that creates a significant amount of the revenue thanks to alliances and has a solid implemented set of alliance capabilities and best practices. In Cisco’s case the revenue element is there and as Steve’s book highlights they have seriously invested in establishing the alliance capabilities and best practices in the Cisco organization.

Other examples of alliance brands are among many of the pharmaceutical companies. The CEO of Ipsen for example presented at the Biopharma conference in Basel earlier this year about the impact of alliances on his business. Basically without alliances Ipsen would not be the company they are today. Marc de Garidel mentioned in his keynote that alliances are responsible for more than 40% of their business. To manage this essential part of the business alliance capabilities are solidly implemented and alliance management is reporting directly to the CEO.

Philips Electronics is well known for their alliance with Sara Lee and the resulting Senseo coffee maker. This alliance is in place for about 10 years now and has brought the Senseo to the market in many countries. The Senseo has helped to change the coffee market. Other Philips alliances include amongst others the PerfectDraft alliance with InBev and the Nivea for Men alliance with Beiersdorf. Philips is also know for having a thorough set of alliance capabilities and best practices implemented for which they in 2007 received the ASAP Alliance Program Excellence award. In the public statements however Philips generally makes no remarks on the contribution of alliances to the topline of the organization. For Senseo we can safely assume that after 10 years the Senseo brand is an alliance brand: without the alliance the Senseo would most likely not exist.*

This brings up another question: can we really focus on one (overall) brand to conclude if a company has an alliance brand? Cisco and Ipsen create apparently all alliances using their main brand. In the Senseo example we see the creation of a separate brand that becomes the alliance brand. Bringing that back to the opening statement: how important is it for an organization to be recognized as an alliance brand?

Being recognized as an alliance brand can help to accelerate growth of the organization. With proper alliances an organization will be able to create achievements they would otherwise not easily create alone. It will also act as a magnet, attracting more potential partners that will approach your organization to do things together. After all you are recognized as an organization that knows how to partner. This also adds another reason for having a solid alliance process and capabilities implemented. Partner selection has a different starting point when being approached rather than when approaching others. It is as such essential to properly select, filter if you want, to end up with successful alliances at the other end of the funnel.

How about your organization, do you have an alliance brand?

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

On the 12th of December ASAP Benelux will come together in the afternoon to hear Professors Ard-Pieter de Man and Geert Duijsters talk about the 4th ASAP State of Alliance Management study, about alliance capability and alliance performance. The study examines how alliances and alliance management influence the performance of firms.

The session will provide you a preview on the study, the methodology used and the results and offers ample room for discussion. It will start at 15:30h and will be held in cooperation with the Brabant Center of Entrepreneurship in Eindhoven. Registration can be done through the form below.

Information obtained for registration will only be used for sharing information about the session and for a one time invitation to a next session.

By Peter, post originally posted at Simoons & Company » Alliances & Collaboration

Earlier this week I watched this video starring Luis Suarez and his life in a corporate world without email. A powerful story that might feel a bit negated at the end when it turns out to be an IBM commercial. But then, having worked in IBM and knowing Luis, I know that Luis really works in this powerful way. With a minimum of email and highly interactive through the social channels.

After seeing the video and realizing the time consumption the inbox asks I was triggered to try to minimize my email behavior. In some cases it is pretty easy: just pick up the phone and in some cases uses instant messaging rather than email. I also found a quick win, that creates some kind of dilemma. I started unsubscribing from email newsletters again. The newsletters that I subscribed to in the past for a reason, but I don’t read anymore. They usually get deleted anyway.

The dilemma it creates is my own email newsletter. I send it out almost every month in both Dutch and English to approximately 1300 people globally. Every newsletter delivers some good conversation with old time connections, but also every newsletter stays with a significant un-opened rate. It serves a purpose and fits the social communication for a number of people. Clearly also for a number it is an inbox-filler. So maybe my next newsletter should be about inbox optimization and unsubscribing from newsletters?

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