What this role owns, and what it coordinates
• Owns: the Alliances operating cadence across all nine partner alliances and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization function — leadership meetings, steering committees, internal QBRprocess and materials — pipeline data quality and reporting in Salesforce, the training and certification calendar, a small and growing team of direct and dotted-line resources, and the standard operating model that every alliance lead, regional cross-alliance lead and specialty company resource works against.
• Contributes to, does not own: the commercial content of each partner’s joint business plan, which sits with that partner’s Global Alliance Lead or co-leads, and the cross-partner technical roadmap, which sits with the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead. You build and run the system this work operates inside; you do not own the partner relationships or the solution architecture yourself.
• Coordinates with, does not control: the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads (EMEA, LATAM, APAC, ANZ, Brazil/LATAM) and the Specialty Company resources (MAP, PMWeb, Verticurl, The Cocktail, MarketData/Match), most of whom report on a dotted line directly into the Chief Alliance Officer or into the alliance they support rather than into this role; and the Partner Marketing Leads who sit under the CMO and are dotted into each alliance. You set the shared standard these resources operate against; you do not own their reporting line.
Program governance and executive support for the CAO (25%)
• Own the Alliances leadership cadence across all nine partner alliances, the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, and the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads — recurring 1:1s, leadership team meetings, steering committees and executive reviews — making sure the right people, materials and follow-ups show up every time, whichever partner or region is on the agenda.
• Hire, direct and grow your own small team as the program’s needs justify it — starting with a handful of direct or dotted-line resources and expanding based on demonstrated impact, not a fixed headcount plan.
• Build and own the materials that represent the Alliances function upward — Enterprise Solutions business reviews, leadership updates, and ad hoc requests from WPP leadership — so the Chief Alliance Officer walks into every senior conversation with a consistent, current narrative that covers the full portfolio, not just the partners with the most mature reporting.
• Run the internal QBR process for every alliance end to end — templates, prep, scheduling with partner-side counterparts, and follow-through on actions — so internal QBRs are a consistent institutional habit rather than something each alliance lead recreates from scratch, and rather than something that only happens for the partners with the most established teams.
• Act as a proxy for the Chief Alliance Officer in operational forums and follow-ups where direct executive presence isn’t required, and know which decisions need escalation versus which can be resolved directly.
Pipeline systems and reporting (25%)
• Own the health of Alliances data in Salesforce across all nine partner alliances — partner-sourced, partner-funded and partner-influenced opportunities recorded consistently and reconciled against what each alliance lead, regional cross-alliance lead and specialty company resource believes is in motion, even where that resource sits outside WPP’s core systems and reporting lines.
• Partner directly with WPP’s central Enterprise Solutions growth and RevOps resources to align Alliances reporting to the broader ES pipeline model, rather than maintaining a shadow system the rest of the business can’t read.
• Build the recurring reporting — pipeline, funding capture, co-sell conversion, delivery capability — that rolls up across all nine alliances and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization practice into one picture for the Chief Alliance Officer and ES leadership, and flag where a specific alliance, region or specialty company’s data quality is putting that picture at risk.
• Own the tools and templates — joint business plan format, funding tracker, opportunity registration checklist — that let a new alliance, a new region, or a newly engaged specialty company stand up its practice against a known standard instead of starting from a blank page.
One-company alignment: cross-alliance, specialty company and partner marketing coordination (25%)
• Work with the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, the nine partner alliance leads, and Enterprise Solutions delivery leadership to define and operate the new-business handoff points, so a signed or funded opportunity in any partner or region moves cleanly into a resourced delivery engagement with clear ownership at every step.
• Bring Specialty Company resources — MAP, PMWeb, Verticurl, The Cocktail, MarketData/Match — into the same operating rhythm, reporting standard and client-facing narrative as WPP’s own alliance teams, so a client or partner experiences one coordinated program regardless of which entity is actually doing the work.
• Coordinate with the Partner Marketing Leads who sit under the CMO and support each alliance on a dotted line, so partner-facing marketing, campaigns and executive moments — Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, AWS re:Invent, and partner-specific equivalents — are planned against a shared calendar and a consistent WPP narrative rather than nine separate ones.
• Coordinate the training and certification calendar across all nine alliances — what’s required, by when, and funded by which partner skilling programme — so certification tracking is a managed pipeline rather than something each alliance lead or specialty resource chases individually.
• Surface and resolve operational friction anywhere in this structure — between an alliance lead and a specialty company resource, between a regional cross-alliance lead and a partner-specific regional team, between delivery and the alliance function — before it needs an escalation to the Chief Alliance Officer.
Global and regional consistency: EMEA, LATAM, APAC and ANZ (25%)
• Act as the connective layer between the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads — EMEA, LATAM, APAC, ANZ and Brazil/LATAM, most of whom report on a dotted line directly into the Chief Alliance Officer — and the partner-specific regional resources nested inside each alliance, such as regional sales, alliance and solutions leads, so the operating model reads as one system rather than two parallel structures that happen to cover the same territory.
• Identify where a global process needs a regional or specialty-company variant — funding mechanics, partner field structure, account coverage, local market dynamics — versus where the global standard should simply hold, and bring those distinctions back into the operating model rather than leaving each region or specialty resource to improvise.
• Build and maintain the regional relationships needed to keep every region’s pipeline, certification and internal QBR data — including data held by specialty company resources such as Verticurl in APAC or PMWeb in Brazil/LATAM — flowing into the same systems as the rest of the program, on the same cadence.
• Represent regional and specialty-company context back into Alliances leadership planning, so global decisions account for where they will, and won’t, translate across every market and every resourcing model WPP relies on.
• Data trust. Pipeline, funding and delivery numbers in Salesforce that Finance, ES leadership and every alliance lead — including specialty company and regional resources — all treat as the number, with a defined and adhered-to reconciliation cadence.
• Cadence adherence. internal QBRs, steering committees and leadership reviews happening on schedule, with materials ready in advance and actions tracked to closure, across all nine alliances and every region.
• Program cohesion. Specialty Company and dotted-line resources operating on the same cadence, systems and client-facing narrative as WPP’s own alliance teams, with inconsistencies surfaced and resolved rather than left to accumulate.
• Handoff quality. New-business handoffs into delivery happening against a documented process, with time-to-handoff and handoff-related escalations tracked and improving.
• Certification coverage. Training and certification requirements tracked against a plan across all nine alliances, with gaps visible before they become funding or eligibility problems.
• Team build-out. A small team stood up and demonstrating impact, with its growth tied to evidence — cadence held, data trusted, handoffs working — rather than to a headcount plan set on day one.
• Executive time. A measurable reduction in the operational and preparation load on the Chief Alliance Officer, evidenced by what the CAO is no longer personally assembling, chasing or reconciling.