Alliance Excellence Awards Submission Tips
A winning ASAP Alliance Excellence Award submission does much more than tout great accomplishments. Don’t get us wrong, end outcomes are a crucial part of any nomination, but the “how” is as important as the “who” and “what.”
A well-rounded case couples concrete results with details of how the organization(s) applied the tricks of the alliance management trade in a novel way to achieve them.
Award submissions are broken down into four categories:
- Exemplary – Did this alliance or practice achieve something groundbreaking for the company, partnership, alliance profession, or public at large? What makes it stand out among other collaborations? Hard numbers, concrete KPIs, and unique feats, such as revenue generation, partner satisfaction survey statistics, alliance portfolio growth, solution development success, and other tangible metrics, go a long way toward bolstering this section.
- Innovative – How did you use traditional tools and processes (e.g., governance, health checks, partner fit assessments, charters, joint value creation exercises, workshops, etc.) to drive these outcomes? Did you put different twists or uses on them that go against the grain, or adapt them creatively to fit the current times? What lessons from this initiative could serve other alliance managers? It helps to answer these questions in the context of the practices outlined in The Handbook of Alliance Management: A Practitioner’s Guide and the accompanying IT and biopharma supplements.
- High-impact – This section provides an opportunity to highlight the qualitative impact of your collaboration(s) or alliance practice that complements the quantitative success metrics detailed in the first section. Did you improve customer or partner experiences? Did the alliance practice raise its profile in the eyes of the C-suite? Did it create unique strategic value for the organization?
- Open – Have you shared lessons that can be learned from your practice to the extent that is possible without compromising competitive advantage? Have you presented a case study at an ASAP conference, webinar, or chapter meeting, or a non-ASAP event?
Of course, supporting materials are encouraged. News articles, videos, copies of the tools utilized in the initiative(s), charts, presentations, and other illustrations can accompany each submission. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!
Watch the video below for additional tips.