This Constellation Research best-practices report, written by Vice President and Principal Analyst Cindy Zhou and published in March 2018, examines why existing processes and collaboration tools struggle to support marketers and sellers working across alliance partners.

It describes how joint go-to-market work often runs on emails, calls and spreadsheets, citing Constellation's survey finding that planning one campaign with another group or partner can take upward of 53 steps and communication touchpoints.

The report outlines the basics of alliance automation platforms, six benefits they offer, why different roles benefit, case studies, and key considerations for evaluating vendors.

• Facilitate marketing, sales and product team alignment
• Deliver pipeline transparency through CRM and marketing automation integration
• Accelerate deals
• Key evaluation questions: scalability, keeping pace with partner demands, and data analytics

This IDC InfoBrief, written by Chris Webber, Research Director for Strategic Alliances at IDC, and sponsored by WorkSpan, was published in June 2019. It looks at how growing customer expectations are leading companies to rely more on partners and ecosystems.

The brief compares traditional alliance management, with spreadsheets, manual updates and separate systems for each partner, to an ecosystem cloud model with shared plans, cross-company workflows and live pipeline reporting.

It also covers the top challenges executives report in managing alliances and ecosystems, common barriers to ecosystem success, and three focus areas for addressing them: management, engagement, and analysis and intelligence.

WorkSpan’s co-founder and Chief Customer Officer kicked off the event sharing his Ecosystem Market Overview, including 6 best practices and trends that have been developed through numerous roundtables with co-sell experts throughout the year.

Jay McBain, The Principal Analyst for Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems - Forrester and 2021 Channel Influencer of the Year graced the Ecosystem Business Summit and shared his insights about Market Transformation and the Decade of Ecosystem as part of an interesting discussion with Amit Sinha, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, WorkSpan.

Karl Fahrbach, Chief Partner Officer and Member of the Senior Executive Team at SAP had an amazing session with Amit Sinha, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, WorkSpan about Leading the Ecosystem Transformation with SAP Next Gen Partnering.

At the recent Ecosystem Business Summit, HPE’s Vice President and GM, Worldwide Ecosystem Sales Leader David Stone and Mayank Bawa, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, WorkSpan had a conversation about how HPE built a world-class Ecosystem organization, platform, and measurements to win.

Ecosystem Business Summit was an immense hit! Here is the session from Mayank Bawa, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, WorkSpan talks about how ecosystems offer a great potential to business and shares his vision about the era of partner ecosystem.

Outstanding session at the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals annual Summit event with Dan Rippey at Microsoft! Dan is Director of Engineering for the One Commercial Partner (OCP) organization.

"With WorkSpan we're able to bridge a gap to have our partners engage in P2P relationships and embrace multi-party collaboration - not only to create new solutions offerings but also joint sales engagement and success opportunities. Microsoft just lets partners come together and let the magic happen.

We love to hear from our WorkSpan customers! Here are a few quick comments from our amazing customers Karl Fahrbach at SAP, Jay McBain at Forrester, and David Stone at HPE.

We love to hear from our WorkSpan customers! Here are a few quick comments from our amazing customers Thomas Muller and Vishy Ramaswamy at Wipro, Eugene H. Banks at Ericsson, and Trina Horner at Verizon.

We love to hear from our WorkSpan customers! Here are a few quick comments from our amazing customers Tom Stuermer at Accenture, Jason McKinney at NetApp, and Julia Chen at Cisco.

We love to hear from our WorkSpan customers! Here are a few quick comments from our amazing customers David Stone at HPE, Dan Rippey at Microsoft, and Bronwyn Hastings at Citrix.

Hear from SAP partner program leaders on how WorkSpan has helped them take their programs to the next level.

This guide covers partner co-investment programs, also known as partner incentive funds, and focuses on market development funds (MDF).

It describes eight types of partner incentive funds, how partner incentives are evolving in modern ecosystems, and the benefits partner funds offer.

The guide then explains what MDF is, how to create a successful MDF program, four steps to design one, eleven considerations for MDF program policy, and how partner funds management platforms support these programs.

• Market development funds
• Sales campaign funds
• Outcome-based funds
• Partner rebate funds
• Lifecycle funds
• Funded heads
• Partner infrastructure funds
• Partner enablement

This guide explains co-selling, in which complementary partners such as hardware and software vendors, systems integrators, hyperscalers and managed service providers sell a combined solution to shared customers.

It suggests factors to consider before building a co-sell program, including your value proposition, target customers, existing customers to deepen relationships with, and potential complementary partners.

Sections cover what co-selling is, co-sell motions, how to drive co-sell partnerships, how to measure partner co-selling, best practices, and the role of ecosystem business management platforms.

This e-book makes the case that companies should stop managing partners in separate silos by type and tier, and instead take an ecosystem approach that brings alliances and channels together.

It describes breakthroughs in ecosystem thinking, such as partners working as peers and partnerships that involve three or more companies, and then sets out nine best practices for building a partner ecosystem.

Later sections cover how organizations are adopting these practices and closing thoughts.

• Operationalize co-selling across all partner models
• Unlock cross-company collaboration
• Measure and report like a direct sales team
• Harness multi-way partnering
• Build infrastructure for pre-pipeline
• Source innovation from everywhere
• Align processes with joint solution partners
• Prioritize data security
• Adopt a shared system of record for partnering

Partner Funds Management solution brief with quotes from Red Hat.

This solution brief covers the Microsoft co-sell model and the manual work that makes it hard for partners to scale, such as entering referral data and keeping pipeline visibility current.

It describes WorkSpan's integration with Microsoft Partner Center and your CRM, which lets teams submit CRM opportunities to Partner Center, accept inbound referrals and keep opportunity data synced in both directions.

• Referral sharing with value and sales stage mapping, autofill and validation
• Opportunity merge to avoid CRM duplicates
• Shared data views, workflows and collaboration tools
• Auto-generated reports and charts to share with Microsoft

This solution brief covers the AWS co-sell model and the manual work that makes it hard for partners to scale, such as entering referral data and keeping pipeline visibility current.

It describes WorkSpan's integration with AWS ACE and your CRM, which lets teams submit CRM opportunities to AWS ACE, accept inbound referrals and keep opportunity data synced in both directions.

• Referral sharing with value and sales stage mapping, autofill and validation
• Opportunity merge to avoid CRM duplicates
• Shared data views, workflows and collaboration tools
• Auto-generated reports and charts to share with AWS

This solution brief explains co-selling, where a company and its partners work together to sell offerings to shared customers, and why it is often hard to manage.

It describes the common problems: partner teams relying on spreadsheets, slide decks, emails and partner portals, difficulty forecasting the co-sell business, and the risk of exposing sensitive data to the wrong parties.

The brief outlines WorkSpan Co-Sell Management, which supports co-sell referral and opportunity management and joint account plans, with CRM integrations and control over user access to co-sell data.

This solution brief covers co-built offerings: joint solutions created by a company and one or more partners, often involving software, hardware, cloud, SI and MSP partners.

It explains why getting joint solutions to market is hard, with many stakeholders across partners and portfolios that can include hundreds of joint solutions, each managed as an ad hoc project.

The brief describes how WorkSpan connects partners on a single cloud platform to run co-solution processes, and includes an example of SAP running its co-innovation program on WorkSpan with partners across multiple regions.

This solution brief explains what market development fund (MDF) programs are and the challenges they commonly face: unused funds, opaque processes, disjointed campaign execution and difficulty measuring ROI.

It describes how WorkSpan supports MDF programs end to end, giving program owners and partners a single interface for fund requests, campaign proposals, claims and reimbursements, with visibility into fund availability and status.

The brief includes a customer example from SUSE, which runs MDF programs with IHV partners including Cisco, HPE, Fujitsu and Lenovo, and a quote from Red Hat on its MDF program.