Building an Allyforce, both in principle and in execution, can work for a range of companies. The primary criteria are:

• Are sales conducted by an individual person knowing the right person to connect with?
• Is finding the right person or right company a large part of the challenge?
• Do you have complimentary, non-competing solutions in the market who want to work with you?

So, for example, someone who sold to hospitals and there are only 5 hospitals in the entire area and the only person who could buy was the head of surgery would not benefit. They know exactly which accounts to call, and there aren't many of them. They know the exact person within the organization to reach and already know the name and title.

Whether you were a big company or a small company in that scenario wouldn't matter.

Let's take a look at how big, medium-sized, and individuals can benefit from this approach and mindset.

The individual targeting individuals

If you are a chiropractor or a wedding planner, you might not thinking of proactively reaching out to people. You could depend just on search engine marketing and blogging and that could work.

But imagine if, for example, you were a wedding planner, and you build an Allyforce relationship with three Allies: a caterer, a florist, and an invitation designer. And you felt their products and service were good.

Could you imagine setting up an easy way of sending (and tracking that send) contact information to the caterer, the florsti and invitation designer and enabling them to forward information to you.

You could do this via email or spreadsheet or with a proprietary tool (to address the logistics of it) but set that aside for a moment: do you see the power of building an Allyforce in your local community?

The small high-tech company targeting Fortune 1000

High-tech companies targeting Fortune 1000's need to be able to touch as many account and touch the right people in those accounts. Fortune 1000's can be notoriously hard to navigate to find a decision-maker - wouldn't it be great if you could collect and assimilate information from people who are doing the same type of prospecting as you?

Let's take for example you sell traffic management software. You could work with someone who does logging, DNS management, and maybe high-end routers. You're addressing the similar space of managing the traffic and speed of the network, but don't compete directly. Some of your customers could be great customers for those in your Allyforce; some of those were you lost deals could be equally great.

Plus, your Allies will know about accounts you haven't thought of and warn you of those you are. It's a good fit.

The small low-tech company targeting SMBs

When targeting SMB's, you can actually broaden your potential network because the decision-maker is often the same for many functions. For example, an environmentally-friendly credit-card processor was paired up with a local advertising company and a restaurant-supplies company. Why? Restaurant owners made good shared targets for credit-card processing, for local advertising, as well as for restaurant-supplies. Imagine the need to target a wide area of local business owners without an Allyforce behind you.

Large companies targeting large companies

Here's where I initially got the idea: I worked at IBM where there are several reps each with their own lines of business and products...all calling the same companies in the same territory. Problem was, there was no way to leverage each other's meetings and relationships.

Large companies can often benefit by enabling individual reps in the field actually share contact information with each other at the prospecting level and provide real-time updates on accounts and personalities.

Imagine if a company that had a division hardware would effectively communication across its field sales reps what is going on with the division selling software.

The central premise of being able to truly share in revenue-generating partnerhip can apply in many instances, again, given the nature of the territory, the product being sold, and the partnerships being formed.

It's a huge amount of unlocked potential waiting to be tapped.

Powered by Qumana

This is the blog for Allyforce -- which allows B2B sales reps to securely exchange leads with other reps as easily as using Facebook.

This allows companies to truly leverage their partnerships to find opportunities faster.

It is written primarily by the founder of Allyforce.