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The end of a year is a great time to reflect on achievements, highs and lows and use these experiences to create plans and goals for a new year of opportunities. We leave you with three questions to ask about how you will make your alliance management better in 2023.
2022 highlights
In many ways, 2022 has been challenging to navigate in business and, for some of you, personally. Continued supply-chain interruptions, the continued war in Ukraine with its impact on energy markets and inflation increasing at levels not seen for decades across western economies – all have required organizations to navigate new uncertainties.
Yet 2022 has also been a great year for advancing partnerships. This is not just for life science and technology firms: across industries, more and more companies rely on strategic alliances, partnerships and ecosystems to grow and innovate with shared resources, investments and risks.
We saw many examples at the ASAP Global Summit in Tampa, USA in April, the ASAP BioPharma Summit in Boston, USA in September and the ASAP European Summit in Amsterdam, Netherlands in October. We spoke at all 3 conferences on the need for digitization to manage alliances to best practice standard so they can be successful, on how to securely collaborate with partners in real time and alliance management analytics to reach the hearts and minds of the C-suite and partners. Seeing everyone in person certainly was a highlight.
What is ahead in 2023 and beyond
Many of you ask us what is to come. In short, strategic partnerships and evolving bi-lateral partnerships to multi-lateral ecosystems continues across industries. This is because while partnerships facilitate a desired outcome bi-laterally, a well-orchestrated ecosystem can allow better outcomes to occur with greater speed and at scale.
When discussing the future of alliance management in his plenary address at ASAP’s Global Summit in Tampa, USA, Jay McBain, chief analyst at Canalys, explained:
“It’s a future marked by the Decade of the Ecosystem. It’s a future in which 76 percent of CEOs feel that their current business models will be unrecognizable—perhaps wholly obliterated—within the next five years. The main disruptive change agent? Ecosystems.”
Across sectors, fundamental strategic and operational challenges remain to make that future happens. Just to highlight one, understanding your partners – their needs, their constraints, their goals and their challenges to align stakeholders, is key to partnering success.
Three questions to make your alliance management better in 2023
A robust alliance-centric digital infrastructure will optimize collaboration and alignment, reduce resource needs and support achieving alliance aims more quickly and with less risk. This is important because speed and risk are always primary factors in maximizing financial return. Alliance managers must manage to translate the many financial and non-financial contributions their alliances make to the company’s bottom line for their C-suite – because their C-suite won’t make that translation for them.
As senior executives place ever higher expectations on alliance managers and their team, we leave you with three questions to think about as you enter the new year:
- How will your team meet these rising internal expectations?
- With an unlimited budget, how would your alliance team be resourced to effectively serve its most important alliances?
- If your existing team could free up 25% of their time by cutting out repetitive administrative work (preparing reports, following up internally), how would you redeploy how your team members interact with their partners?
When asked “What differentiates great alliance professionals from good ones?” our friends at The Rhythm of Business explain that “The great ones strive for excellence in everything they do, getting a little bit better every day.”
We are excited about what 2023 holds in store for alliance management as we continue our quest to make your alliance management better.
We hope you get some down time during the next few weeks and wish you a prosperous and fulfilling 2023.