Last week I performed a short survey on LinkedIn. I asked the following question to a group of alliances and partnerships professionals:
“What do you see as your biggest challenges with regards to Alliances & Partnerships for 2020?”
I received many responses and a few themes seem to surface:
People and behavior: hiring the right people with the right substance in building long term partnerships is challenging. This also shows in the answers that highlight difficulties with building trust, maintaining honesty, integrity and transparency.
Many people from the UK cited Brexit as an important challenge for this year. Also people from other parts of the world added outside circumstances, such as the Hong Kong situation, the US-China trade war and uncertain economic times in general as a particular challenge for 2020.
Alliances and partnerships are all about creating joint value. Defining value and translating value into results is a theme that continues to live among the respondents as one of their biggest challenges.
The next challenge is about involving stakeholders and a constant change in senior leadership. Onboarding of stakeholders properly and ensuring that they see value in the alliance is a challenge, as well as dealing with opposing stakeholders.
Speed and focus are two main elements that define the fifth theme in the answers I received. People are challenged by the balance of short term results vs long term business development. This appears to be especially challenging when the partner has a different pace of growth.
This is only a preliminary overview of the 5 themes that stood out. The survey is still open and if you haven’t responded yet, I would greatly appreciate to include your input as well:
What do you see as your biggest challenges with regards to Alliances & Partnerships for 2020?