CHAMP Partner Analysis

With the profiling done and your dream team assembled, you are ready to meet in person and begin analyzing your opportunity in the marketplace. The tools CHAMP employs to do this should be familiar to most in business. The power in them is in their prescriptive simplicity and the requirement that parties from both companies and with varied domain experience work together to discover the true potential of the strategic alliance.

At this point, I need to advocate bringing a 3rd party professional into this process. A trained and experienced CHAMP practitioner will provide a number of valuable additions to this process.

Full Cycle Understanding - Trained professionals from Upland Altify know the full process, where each step is trying to bring the team and the common obstacles and pitfalls getting there.

Experience - When the team inevitably struggles with the critical thinking required in the analysis phase and the creativity in the upcoming planning phase, a consultant can help break through with examples of how other companies solved these challenges.

Mediation - If you're really digging into this exercise, you and your partner will inevitably butt heads. After all, you both have unique perceptions of each others strengths, weaknesses and contributions to the alliance. Having a neutral person to mediate and find the common ground will accelerate the process, get you to a better plan and eliminate the "bad guy" from heated discussions.

Facilitation - A 3rd party professional will be able to set teams, time frames for each exercise, assign homework and push the team through the process ensuring both a great plan and the efficient use of the team's time.

The analysis phase covers four important areas that need to be worked on together with your partner: Revenue and Growth Planning, Joint Value Propositions, a SWOT Analysis and Critical Success Factors

Revenue and Growth Planning - This is simply a documentation of last year's business, the current year's numbers and forecasts for next year. Make sure you are using the metrics important to your alliance which could be revenue, bookings, 1st year bookings, annual recurring revenue, etc. Here's an example:

Joint Value Propositions - Here you are defining each company's individual value proposition to the alliance and the joint value proposition the alliance provides to the customer. a series of questions posed against your inital drafts will help hone the value propositions; What?, So what? How much? Prove it?

SWOT Analysis - We all know what this is but try having each team come up with ones for their company and then for the alliance company. Review of these should help you glean a single SWOT that represents the Strengths/Weakness and Opportunities/Threats for the alliance.

Critical Success Factors - Finally distill the Value Proposition and SWOT analysis into 3-5 critical success factors. These will serve as guide posts for the last step we'll discuss in this series, the actual CHAMP Plan!