While ecosystems promise tremendous value, they also come with risks. Executives get worried. Sometimes, frozen. They are terrified of working with competitors. They get paralyzed at the thought of sharing data. They can’t seem to jump over decades of perceptions that “this is the enemy.” These are the last people with whom they’d ever want to share control of information, data, vision, and customers.
Sound familiar?
The fact is: these are real fears. In old business models, these fears are core beliefs posing as true facts.
Yet, given the value and potential for growth at stake, there are new models of thinking, partnering, and creating the future.
When faced with tremendous opportunity on the one hand, and paralyzing fears on the other…what is the way through? The Accenture report outlines three crucial areas:
* A Strategic Market Play
As in all aspects of a successful business, each player needs to have a clear strategy. With a vision, compelling business case, clear priorities, and defined plays, you can move forward into significant growth opportunities.
While building a strategy, create a clear roadmap outlining plans for incubating, launching, and scaling delivery. In the process, new opportunities emerge for complementary services, products, and solutions.
* A Clear Role
With clear roles, each partner understands how this creates benefit. Benefits are like an upward spiral of win-win: for the customer, for revenue streams, and partner innovation. Clear roles at the beginning enable companies to pick the best complementary teammates. When people have role clarity, it’s easier to create tremendous value.
* A Complementary Partner
The ecosystem business model offers opportunities for a variety of partners. Each must be carefully selected-not only by unique role and value proposition. Some partners may offer different values: such as social partners or solution, sales, and delivery partners.
Ready for picking your best partners?
Look for partners who share complementary capabilities, collaborative mindset, and domain expertise. Explore the intersections that can be used for innovation to build customer relationships and gather critical data.
As you’re thinking about Ecosystem Partners, look at it from critical functions.
Market Play: The big idea of disrupting the market to create new value.
Ecosystem Producer: This is the leader responsible for making the play, from start to finish.
Platform Ecosystem: This is a set of partners involved in building the core platform solution. This can include infrastructure providers, network providers, technology partners, research partners, component suppliers, and more.
Offering Ecosystem: This includes a collaborative set of partners that develop, sell, deliver and service the offerings. This can include partners from solutions, sales, delivery, service, information-content, to social partners.
Customers: Ultimately, the customer must receive exceptional value from the partnership.
As you’re reading this, no doubt, the wheels are turning. What is the market play in your field? Who could be the best partner to make the play? Who would the set of partners be for your ecosystem? And so on…
Once the mind starts thinking of collaboration, partnerships, and expanded business models…it’s good to keep going.
In sales, this is where the rubber meets the road.
Having the idea to create a Partner Ecosystem is exhilarating. Who doesn’t want to create the disruptive offering that is the best thing since sliced bread?
The good news is: exploring partnerships, creating new offerings, and making warm introductions to the right people in your industry has never been easier.
With partnership Co-Selling, it’s easier than ever to connect-the-dots between your vision and reality. If you’re dreaming of building a disruptive new ecosystem-with Co-Selling you’ve got the tools to succeed.
With the shift to Partner Ecosystems, successful businesses are shaping the market and realizing significant revenue potential. The new value proposition enables a disruptive opportunity for enhancing customer value-at the intersection of functional areas, technologies, and industries. Partnership Co-Selling is what translates your brilliant ideas into reality.
Using a platform like is the simplest way to get your sales team on board. CoSell is a robust platform that makes it easy and fast to automate and scale collaborative co-selling across sales teams.
If you’d like to explore how this can help you and your team boost sales and win major clients fast-please reach out to us. To learn more, check us out.
Originally published at https://www.blog.cosell.io on June 30, 2020.
