Project Detail
IDC: Business Practices Guides
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“Ed brings two essential qualities: not only can he quickly grasp the business problem and create an actionable plan, but he is also very flexible in dealing with changes that occur down the line.” —Dot Allen Vice President of Consulting, IDC |
Background
IDC is one of the premier global providers of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology and communications industries. With over 775 analysts in 50 countries, IDC has provided strategic insights to help its clients achieve their business objectives for more than 40 years.
Business Problem
In late 2005, the IDC Consulting group was working with a major technology provider to develop a set of guides targeted to the technology provider's reseller partners. These guides were designed to document business practices from successful partners, with the goal of sharing these business practices across the entire partner community. To obtain a comprehensive view, the IDC Consulting team was looking for assistance in conducting a large number of interviews with partners across the globe and in distilling the key findings down into succinct, well-written solution guides, all in a compressed timeframe.
Solution
Working closely with the IDC Consulting team and starting with a list of the technology provider's successful resellers, Callan Consulting developed an in-depth interview guide and conducted interviews with senior managers at over 50 partners spread between North and South America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. The results of each interview were captured in detailed write-ups that were shared back with the client.
In addition, Callan Consulting collaborated with IDC on three separate guides describing different avenues to revenue opportunity for partners of the technology provider. Each guide was 12-15 pages in length and focused on a different area of the provider's solution offerings. As a final validation step, the guides were shared with select members of the partner community for their feedback prior to publication.
Results
IDC Consulting, the technology partner, and its partners were all very pleased with the results. The reviewing partners commented that the level and depth of information shared was very valuable to them. And the solution provider, in addition to publishing each of the guides to its partner community, came back and asked IDC for additional follow-on work to translate the material in the guides into different formats, including PowerPoint slides.
© 2008 Ed Callan. All rights reserved. Client quotes used by permission.