Last Updated on April 21, 2022
We hope you enjoyed your Easter, Passover, or a wonderful weekend to all who do or do not celebrate! Last week we had a blast hosting our Ecosystem Business Summit with some of the top-notch ecosystem thought leaders – Mary Sawyer, Sandy Hogan, and Gavriella Schuster.
With more than 700 people registered, we had around 200 ecosystem intellectuals tuning in live, constantly contributing thoughts and engaging in discussions.
Here’s the Event Roundup!
We’ve curated the event’s panel highlights and poll responses. Read on to dive deeper into the topics that matter most to you!
The Evolution of Partnerships
There has been a tremendous explosion in the nature of partnering and the way companies partner with each other. As a result, there has been a related surge in innovation, customer value, opportunities, and access.
Blurring Lines of Partnerships
It is now harder for companies to segment and differentiate their partners. With the growing technology, we are seeing partners with multiple dimensions. Now companies have more diverse opportunities to build innovative joint solutions, service offerings, and go to market.
Organizational effort for Partner Success
The whole organization must strive to effectively embrace partnerships to build innovative market solutions. Solution teams, marketing teams, and sales teams across company boundaries should come together to create partner success. Removing those walls drives tremendous energy for innovation across the industry.
CEOs Must Lead
These imperatives can only be propagated throughout the company with leadership by the CEOs. The CEO must also be determined and bought into partner successes, empowering employees and steering them in the right direction.
WorkSpan’s Mission
WorkSpan’s mission has been to provide our customers with solutions to partner more effectively. Our customers can create more solutions, campaigns, leads, and opportunities that can be executed with speed and scale.
WorkSpan’s Co-selling Mechanism
WorkSpan set out to create a solution that could allow both partner managers and salespeople on the field to manage co-selling. WorkSpan has built a native Salesforce app that can be installed in our customer’s Salesforce CRM. WorkSpan has built tools fit for the multi-partner world to establish a connection with any other company in the ecosystem.
"Our goal is to provide the tools and mechanisms, where partners can run simple processes over and over with each other, allowing more people from different teams to participate so that they can create value and abundance together."
Deloitte’s Mission in the Partner Ecosystem
At Deloitte, Mary focuses on the centralization of ecosystems management and governance in this new era of partner ecosystems. The Ecosystem Governance Board at Deloitte ensures that the organization is sharing best practices and assets in the most cost-effective way. As an industry leader, Deloitte always leads from the front, with its tremendous wealth of industry and functional knowledge.
Deloitte’s Partnerships
Deloitte partners with a wide range of companies, from startups to industry behemoths. Its focus is on finding partners that align with Deloitte’s values to make progress on shared services, mission, and values.
The WorkSpan-Deloitte Partnership
Deloitte always strives to find efficiency and automation in processes while creating the best product. WorkSpan’s capabilities in co-selling, co-marketing, and co-investing were exactly what Deloitte was looking for to enhance their effectiveness and collaboration with partners across the WorkSpan network.
“We looked at our over 100 alliance partners that were already on [WorkSpan’s] platform. And that matters to us because the partners that we respect also have trusted WorkSpan for their activities.”
Collaborative Partnerships with Customers
In this ecosystem with rapidly changing customers and expectations, everything seems very on-demand. An important point to remember is that technology is not the objective for customers; they are enablers. Hence, we must think about what outcome we provide as a collective set of partners.
Managed Services
Changing customer lifecycles force companies to go to market in a much more scalable and quick way; managed services are taking on a whole new life. It is no longer about the linear notion of account control and customer control, but rather about how each company’s capabilities complement each other and how the focus goes from transactions to customers.
VMware’s Partnership Strategy in the Changing Market
VMware decided to shift its strategies in a few critical areas. It created a flexible and collaborative business model framework; doubling down on investment for use case offerings; investing in profitability in the incentives to reward partners.
Future Partnerships
VMware tries to find the fastest path to value while leveraging the capabilities of partners of joint ecosystems.
“All of [these changes] have been a key driving force in helping us evaluate what do we need to change and evolve and we're staying very laser focused on the customer perspective of that.”
Transition to a Larger Ecosystem Strategy
Consumption trends have evolved and are more fluid in the new cloud economy. To drive consumption and usage, there has to be an understanding of the multi-dimensional partners and the new forms of profitability. Gavriella and her team have been helping Microsoft’s partners make the transition based on this model.
Scaling the GTM Model in a Larger Ecosystem
When an organization is performing multiple tasks, it must understand where each of those fits into the broader ecosystem. First, it all starts with understanding the needs of the customer. Then, an organization can prepare for a go-to-market campaign that would add value to those needs.
Creating Partner Attach Motions
Understanding whether one should act as a lead or a partner attach is a necessary step to figuring out when connecting to the other players that are in that motion. It is crucial to get engaged at just the right moment, to maximize your sales and your profitability.
“It's really important to have an ecosystem around you as a customer and as a provider...if you want to continue to grow your business these organizations that are in your ecosystem really add value. ”
During the summit, we ran a few short polls. Have a look at the interesting results!
Have Questions?
If you have questions or want to chat with us, please reach out.
We’d love to hear from you!
Thanks again for making EBS a success. We’ll see you at our next event!
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