A few prospects I have been speaking with lately have raised an objection to the notion of putting a list of partners, and then employees on their site for others to see. Their concerns are usually either due to other partners seeing the list and raising competitive objections, or the possibility for their employees and those of their partners to be recruited.
My usual response to this is to ask if they have tried visiting Linkedin lately, putting in the name of their company or any one of their partners and seeing what the results are. Most people are not aware, or have simply overlooked that all of this information is clearly visible on the net already. The barriers to corporate data have come tumbling down – or put differently – the borders of the organization have extended out far beyond the corporate firewall.
This can be seen as a threat as mentioned, but it can equally be seen as an opportunity. Here are two ways in the latter category:
1) By providing your partner community with a list of other partners it helps to create a sense of community. It allows partners to connect with each other and exchange ideas, learning’s, initiatives. Microsoft has recognized this as is clear from their emphasis on ‘partner to partner’ collaboration. There are a host of reasons why you might find benefit in your partners working with each other – hopefully on your products and services.
2) By making your employees visible and accessible, you create multiple points of interaction between people in your organization and those of your partner. This is the essence of any functional business relationship. Savvy partner managers know that recruiting partners to your program is just the first step in the engagement. The harder part is to activate them, and that requires that functional business relationships become established between real human beings. This is what drives business, not legal agreements.
To my mind the benefits here significantly outweigh the potential pitfalls of this type of transparency.
