The Importance of Partners for Developing the Right Sales Strategy

By Tanya Fritz Catalano, North American Channel Manager, Aleri

As most readers of this publication can attest, the enterprise IT market is one of the most competitive and challenging sales environments in the US economy today. One of the primary reasons is that IT solutions are, by their very nature, part of a network comprised of tens or even hundreds of other vendors’ products. This means that selling an IT solution requires knowledge of, compatibility with, and very often the cooperation of other vendors in your space. For this reason, the sales strategy of all strong IT solution providers requires a robust channel partner component.

Choosing to align with the right partners is essential to becoming a market leader and maintaining that status. Partners affect every part of an organization: sales, marketing, finance, accounting, product development, delivery, and customer service, so choosing the right companies to align with is critical. One of the most important areas of the business that partners affect is revenue, but building successful alliances and channel relationships also deeply influences market awareness, or “buzz”, which is important during the early adopter phase of a company’s lifecycle. As an emerging technology, CEP platforms offer the ability to guide adoption and growth in the market, and that evolution has a lot to do with the partner companies we choose to work with.

There is a spectrum for building partnerships and the pendulum swings from a margin-based business to revenue streams based on relationships and an influential sales process. Some companies choose a growth tactic of scraping out every last penny in margin from their pool of reseller or OEM partners. It might sound like a ruthless way to grow a business, but many of the tier one vendors on the market today successfully employ this approach. The other end of the spectrum is to view partners as influencers in sales deals, which means the channel sales and alliance teams should be familiar with every company in the ecosystem, have a relationship with the top 25-50 vendors, and steer those relationships to result in these partners talking about their solution and recommending buyers to the sales team. This is an amorphous strategy and while growing a business through a process of building strong relationships is very likely to result in market awareness and ultimately direct revenue, that revenue isn’t likely to be recognized by the company for 18-24 months after the relationship building begins.

The most successful and sustainable channel strategies, therefore, will incorporate the right mix of technology, reseller and referral partners. This is critical to driving revenue in the timeframe that the board or shareholders expect. The most efficient way to do that is through multiple types of partnerships within the ecosystem, which are tightly bound and which directly affect each others ability to deliver value to their respective customer bases. For example, a clear product ecosystem exists in the trading software arena and complex event processing platforms, while new entrants to that ecosystem, fit in seamlessly. In a production environment, a CEP platform will need to be integrated with hardware, market data providers, data warehouses, order management systems, order executions systems, dashboards and front end trading applications, among other components of the trading system. Of course, choosing the right vendor can affect how seamless that integration will be.

Partners have been and will continue to be critical to the advancement of and adoption of CEP technologies. Our best partners help us to round out our offering by executing on the following:

Create end-to-end solutions

Our customers seek products that are customized and optimized to their specific market. They rely on vendors with deep familiarity of each component of their solution. So even if the partner doesn’t sell the CEP product, they will win customers by having the ability to integrate with the platform when appropriate and when required by the most demanding customers.

Embrace Innovation

CEP partners must be willing to embrace innovation. As a development platform, complex event processing engines can make other products faster, more flexible, more robust and the core products that power the financial services market (OMS, EMS, data warehouses, etc) must stay on top of that innovation curve. CEP is a key ingredient to keep our partners on top of Wall Street’s demands.

Increase Awareness

Partners are a key component to generating market awareness of new products. For example, consulting partners are critical to market adoption of emerging technologies as they are the thought leaders and innovation drivers for new markets. Customers depend on their trusted advisors to keep them up-to-date with innovative solutions. Some customers today may not understand the variety of business benefits that CEP can bring to the entire enterprise, so they rely on the thought leaders, the consulting companies, to educate them.

Broaden Distribution

As our partners continue to discover the versatile nature that a complex event processing platform can be in their own product line, they will find new ways to integrate it into the design and implementation of solutions for customers. This creates immediate value and results in a win-win for the partner, for Aleri, and for our joint customers.

Retain Customers

Once a customer is won, a company wants to do everything they can to keep that customer happy. As a vendor you need new ways to improve, to upgrade, to migrate, and to evolve with customers, building a relationship that will grow as the product line and the company grows. A complex event processing platform will often prove to be that missing ingredient, the piece that keeps your customer at the table, continually being utilized as a multifaceted solution in new ways to answer your customer’s needs, while you desperately seek to stay alive in this hyper-competitive market.

Whatever alliance strategy a company chooses to grow with, it will be one of the most important rudders for company direction. Choosing the right partners can mean getting to revenue faster than the competition, garnering more press that the competition, achieving market awareness and revenue faster than the competition as well as shortening the sales cycle and having the right foundation to emerge into new markets faster than the competition. Partnering with the right complex event processing vendor can mean faster time to market, stronger customer confidence and more market awareness for the your company as well, as this market continues to grow and adoption becomes faster, more competitive and more critical as vendors quickly begin to outshine each other.