Joint Business Planning: A Myth or Necessity?

I bet you’re hoping I’m going to say “myth.” No one likes planning, right? But we might as well face facts: joint planning with partners is a critical best practice, and vendors that make the effort are much better positioned to have a successful channel.

Joint planning keeps your partnerships from going dormant.

Vendors usually start out well with their new partners: They have agreements, they have the portal in place, they have their deal registration, they have great discounts.

Things are moving along beautifully for the first 30, 60 or 90 days. They probably have some type of a ramp-up plan—but then what?

The partnership falls into limbo after those exciting kick-off months. Sales reps always go for the next shiny object (i.e., a different vendor’s product), so you’ve got to keep them engaged.  A joint and mutually beneficial business plan is key to doing that.

Your ability to keep the plan front-of-mind contributes to channel success, too.

The plan shouldn’t die a slow death on the partner manager’s hard drive. It needs to be a living document that vendor and partner refer to regularly.

The beauty of having a portal like Channeltivity is that the joint business plan can be configured so either side can create, edit, or read it. You can make sure it’s in front of partners every time they log on. They can refer back to it easily, and see how they’re progressing against goals.

This makes quarterly reviews easier, too. Maybe we agreed to a quarterly goal of $25,000 and we can see we’re only at $15,000. This gets everybody focused on how to close that gap.

And the good news is that the planning process doesn’t have to be hard.

You never know the skill level of the people engaging with your partners or partner organizations, and planning can be a daunting task.

Channeltivity’s solution makes planning as easy as completing a form, and that takes all the stress out of it—which means it’s more likely to get done.