Experiential Experiment

Everyone wants to be certified.  If you're certified, you're bonafide.  If you are bonafide, your value is amplified.

In order to get certified you could spend all kinds of time and effort studying, or you could find a boot camp and cram.  Well, in 2005 I was in the latter group.  I packed my bags and headed to Schaumburg, Illinois for a week-long Cisco boot camp in the hopes of being CCDA certified.

The classroom lessons packed tons of information into a tight period, and we all went back to our hotel rooms each night with homework to complete before the next day. Maybe you remember those ads where General Mills asked, "How do they cram all that graham?"  I was asking how we crammed all that test prep.

Friday came and we took the CCDA exam, which had to be in an official test facility with a live proctor.  And you can stop holding your breath, I'm pleased to say
I passed the test.  It was a big relief and those four letters looked great on the old resume, too.

However, there was just one little issue: I was a salesguy and not a network design engineer.  I suppose it was helpful to understand how the pieces fit into an effective network design since it allowed me to better understand the potential needs of my clients as well as to uncover latent needs within my prospects.  But as much as it helped, I wasn't actually making design recommendations or building networks.  My engineers did that work, so my highly vaunted CCDA skills atrophied.

It's the same exact thing with partnerships.  It happens in the early stages with onboarding before sales are closing.  It happens later on with new initiatives and new offerings.  It even happens in more mature partnerships when assumptions can start to rear their ugly heads.

All of this begs the question, "How can we reduce this atrophy and increase meaningful engagement?"  The fact is that if we cannot move our knowledge from our brains to our hands and feet we'll never gain mastery over the information and our mental skills will erode.

There have been a lot of studies done in this area over the past 50 years or so that show we understand better and gain greater proficiency when we engage in an activity.  We learn by seeing, hearing, writing, etc.  We learn even better when we combine these activities, according to the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.  And, although the actual statistics they use are debated the fact remains that the best way to learn and retain information is by combining forms of training, including experiential learning.

And, as we often do here at FusingFocus, instead of just talking about it I want to give you some practical applications to think about and to integrate into your alliances.  Here we go:

1. Onboarding - Onboarding programs for new partners often focus on product training and possibly some sort of sales enablement.  The problem with this, as previously mentioned, is that if you don't have any immediate sales closing the partner won't use their product training or brand new implementation skills.  If you don't use it, you lose it.  To remedy this situation there are a few things you can do:

• Create cross-sell opportunities in existing customer base.  This assumes you are comfortable exposing your existing clientele to the partner, which may or may not be the case.
• Focus on smaller solutions or less expensive products to generate sales faster.  Grab that low hanging fruit and get smaller chunks of experience.  The experience won't have great impact, but going through the motions with develop better understanding for the partner, even with small deals.
• Share existing opportunities that are already in process, thereby generating faster time to ramp and greater self-sufficiency within the partner team.  The long term impact will greatly outstrip any short term costs from sharing the business.

2. Enablement - Product training rapidly dissipates if it isn't used.  Technical training has got to be interlaced between experiential learning, even if it means you do some "ridealongs" on implementation opportunities where the new partner was not initially involved.  Getting them some hands on learning or just knowledge transfer alone will cement their classroom training and get them to an acceptable level of proficiency quicker than any other method.  My recommended strategy is four steps:

1. Audit - The partner audits a project.
2. Share - The partner takes on a level of service with a second project.  This can be grunt work or some manner of low-level services, but the point is that they are getting their hands dirty.
3. Project Management - By the time the third project rolls around, the partner has seen enough that they are able to perform all of the needed services in conjunction with oversight from your project managers.
4. Self-Sufficiency - At this point they can hold their own and manage their own projects, which should bear much fruit in the partnership going forward.

3. New Initiatives - When engaging a partner in a new initiative you need to use some of the same tactics, but you've got to integrate a vastly greater degree of trust and respect.  If you have had success in the past and the partner has proven themselves to be a capable and valuable partner, then you have to treat them as such.  Go through your proven methodology, but acknowledge the value of the partner along the way.  However, as you proceed do not make assumptions.  Work the methodology.

It all boils down to experiential learning since knowledge alone disintegrates very quickly.  An experiential experiment that will pay huge dividends for your business alliances.