This article first appeared in the OneStream blog, written by Stephanie Cramp
Many departments in an organization help to service a partner’s journey. As the leader of OneStream’s Alliances team, I am a steward of our partners’ relationships with these other departments.
Have you ever heard of the phrase it takes a village to raise a child? The OneStream Alliance Partner program may provide the foundation but it’s the many groups and stakeholders that bolster the partners to succeed and grow. Proper stewardship and collaborative working approaches help to align and build opportunity for each partner that in turn positively impacts our overall corporate mission of delivering 100% customer success.
Below are examples of other stakeholders within OneStream that work as an extension of the Alliances team to impact our partners in the spirit of enablement. The relationships between these departments provide a clear focus for a collaborative process that could offer a business benefit and/or strategic opportunity for our partners and OneStream;
- Technical Enablement
- Services and Support
- Training and Certification
- Product Development
- Customer Success
- Sales and Marketing
Alliances doesn’t strictly own the partner journey. It’s the village that works collaboratively to support the journey and growth of our partners. Without collaboration between these groups, the partners can be diverted or misaligned with our corporate objectives that could ultimately lead to reputational risks, unsatisfied customers, or lower retention rates.
The vision of effective stewardship starts at the top. When leadership believes in the model and adopts the 1+1=3 mentality of software vendor, partner, and customer, the net result is success. We are a software firm that built a powerful platform that can address a wide range of customer needs. We have also recognized that in order to scale our business we need to steward our partners at multiple levels within the organization for continued success.
If you take care of your employees and partners, they will take care of your customers. In order to achieve this, you have to collaborate with all stakeholders in the partner’s journey to define process, mitigate risk, and build clear guidelines for a shared understanding of success.
Using a collaborative partner stewardship mindset the end result is the successful enablement and a continued investment for the growth, enhanced learning, and nurturing of the partner community. This wider view of partner relationships creates new value that will help to open doors and unforeseen opportunities.
To learn more about becoming a OneStream partner please visit us here: https://onestreamsoftware.com/partners/.
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash
