business plan for channel partner

"The entire fabric of the Vendor-Partner relationship is going to change as a result of the Customer Success movement." Chris Doell VP of Customer Success at OpenDNS

3 Common Goals

Goal 1: achieve your revenue goals.

"By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator." Walker Information

Drive revenue by focusing on the Customer

Align your portfolio with revenue initiatives, update your route-to-market strategy.

Goal 2: Maximize ROI

"[A manufacturer’s] best bet is to take a page out of the SaaS vendors’ playbook and deploy a customer success function ." "The Manufacturer’s Dilemma" by Geoffrey Moore Venture Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners

Maximizing Lifetime Value (LTV) with a customer lifecycle strategy

Optimize your portfolio mix, goal 3: create a foundation for growth.

"Partners who are leading edge in customer success are seeing double digit increases in renewal rates and expansion rates leading to double or triple the lifetime value of a customer." Ed Daly Customer Success-Global Leader at Cisco

How to Start Your Channel Program

"Understand what your business strategy and your partner strategy is and get started. Cause if you overthink it you’ll make no progress and we know you’re going to leave a ton of money on the table. You don’t want your competitors to get with these partners first to help them build the capability for their offerings and not yours." Ed Daly Customer Success-Global Leader at Cisco

Step 1: Define your priorities

Step 2: segment your portfolio.

Step 3: Select your tech stack

Gainsight for channel partner success, align priorities across your ecosystem.

"Gainsight has enabled us to really have a prescriptive Customer Success approach in a pooled global customer model. And that has enabled us to scale in ways that we hadn’t thought was possible." Greg Stivers SVP of Client Development at SMB-Americas at Concur

Provide visibility and drive accountability

"From an efficiency perspective, we have been able to manage 500% more customers per CSM as the team automated functions in Gainsight and used Cockpit to prioritize the right customers." Chad Horenfeldt VP of Customer Success at Influitive

Engage meaningfully

"Year-over-year cloud revenue growth has improved more than 20% since we have invested in Gainsight. And our NPS scores in different lines of businesses have increased anywhere from five to twenty-five points." Mark Friedman SVP of Global Cloud Customer Success at Genesys

Win in business while being human-first.

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Ready to Move Past Recruitment? 9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices to Set Partners Up for Success

Channel news directly into your inbox.

Once you’ve buttoned down your strategy for recruiting channel partners , you’re ready to establish your channel partner onboarding process. Onboarding is pivotal to your partners’ success in selling your business-to-business (B2B) services, so it must be a focal point of your channel development program and not an afterthought. The old adage “don’t re-invent the wheel” is more apt than ever here, as we spoke with several channel leaders who shared similar views on partner onboarding best practices. But, let’s start at square one:

What is Channel Partner Onboarding?

Channel partner onboarding is a multistep process to initiate and integrate new partners into your company’s partner program. It sets the ground rules and the tone for your relationship. Any major hiccups in this process can compromise your future with a new partner and send them into the welcoming arms of a competitor.

It’s important to understand that onboarding partners is not the same as onboarding direct business customers so they can use your cloud apps or set up hardware. Partner onboarding done well requires more than a couple of web meetings, portal logins and training links; it’s a months-long process that requires both of your organizations to get to know the other so that you can go to market as partners.

Partner onboarding begins in earnest after the agreement is signed. Typically, it includes business planning, sales training, technical training, systems integration (if needed) and usually extends to marketing support, lead generation, co-selling and initial wins.

When done poorly, partner onboarding can cost dearly, including:

When done well, channel partner onboarding offers many rewards, including:

What to Consider in the Channel Partner Onboarding Process

The axiom, “garbage in, garbage out,” aptly explains why your partner program must be well defined before developing your partner onboarding process. Without clear rules of engagement (ROEs) and operational processes, it will be challenging, if not impossible, to set up partners for success.

Here are examples of questions you should ask and answer:

Answers to these sorts of questions will dictate the onboarding process, capacity and pace.

Partner Onboarding: The First 90 Days (& Beyond)

Plan, plan, plan. You need to set key milestones for your critical partnerships. Specifically, mapping expectations for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, six months and 12 months will increase the likelihood of success.

The Channel Company’s IPED Consulting and Research division’s 2017 guide on channel partner program onboarding emphasizes the importance of the first 90 days. “The first 90 days of your relationship directly influence whether the partner will ever become productive.”

What should you do in the first 90 days? We consulted a panel of channel experts who offered the following advice:

“The first 30 days are pure discovery and relationship building,” says Oanh McClure , Director of Alliances and Channels at Zscaler , a provider of cloud security services. “It’s harder to sell a partner on selling your product than sell [your] product to an end-user. You have to enable a partner to know so much that they offer your product first.”

Day 31-60: By day 60, according to our panel, onboarding moves to:

Patrick Sheehan , Senior Director of Field Channel Sales for cloud communications provider Intermedia , says following the orientation period, he likes to “get the sales team trained, engaged and excited about making money” while helping his partner execute demand-generation campaigns and ensuring operations are aligned to get some early wins.

Day 61-90: By day 90, our panel generally agrees that onboarding activities include:

6 Months: Day 91 through 180 is when the training wheels slowly come off and partners put into practice what they’ve learned in the first three months and develop confidence and competence to sell independently.

12 Months: At the end of the first year, it’s time to revisit the business plan with new goals and milestones for year two.

The Importance of a Channel Partner Business Plan

A critical component of channel partner onboarding is developing a joint business plan outlining steps for partners, supported by your team, to reach short- and long-term goals from selling your solutions.

A solid business plan also lays the groundwork for trust and accountability, adds Robert Maute , former Senior Vice President of Channel Sales for Evolve IP . He says, “The business plan should answer why you are establishing the partnership, agreed-upon goals and benchmarks, how you will work together to accomplish these goals and how to measure success.”

Create (and Use!) a Channel Partner Onboarding Checklist

One of the hallmarks of a successful channel partner onboarding process is that it’s repeatable and easy to follow. Creating a channel partner onboarding checklist is a smart way to keep the process on track.

“An onboarding checklist serves as a guide for your internal staff throughout the partner onboarding period,” says Heather Tenuto , Chief Revenue Officer for enterprise channel management platform provider Zift Solutions . “It also helps your partners to understand the process from end to end and see critical milestones at a glance.”

Partner Onboarding Portal – To Use or Not to Use?

According to a Forrester Wave TM report on Partner Relationship Management (PRM) released in November 2020, channel programs on average have more than 100 distinct elements, with onboarding being among them.

“With so many moving parts, manual processes are prone to human error,” says Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “This potential for mistakes is multiplied if your channel program is successful and you’re onboarding partners en masse. Using a partner onboarding portal to scale with you as your company grows is vital for long-term success.”

9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices from Channel Leaders

To help you create an effective channel partner onboarding process, we spoke with 10 accomplished channel business leaders about their experiences building and running partner onboarding.

Nine partner onboarding best practices surfaced from these interviews.

Best Practice 1: Keep in Mind Partner Onboarding is an Ongoing Process

“Onboarding is an ongoing process,” says channel veteran Maute. “It is not a single meeting with partner leadership or a training session with their sales team that magically turns on the revenue stream.”

Partner onboarding not a single event, nor is it an isolated exercise; it’s an integral part of your entire partner program and an essential tool for both short- and long-term goals.

“Don’t think of onboarding by itself,” says Intermedia’s Sheehan. “I’ve found that looking at channel development holistically allows you to create the most effective onboarding process and successful outcomes.”

Best Practice 2: Establish Simple & Repeatable Processes

Complexity is the enemy of the good when creating an easily replicable partner onboarding process. Panelists cautioned against building a 90-step program unless absolutely necessary and encouraged automating as many steps as possible using a Partner Management Solution like ZiftONE TM .

“Keep it simple,” says KELA’s Prakash. “Be strategic and consistent with your onboarding. The front-end work can make all the difference on how the partner engages with you in the future.”

Liz Lederer , Senior Vice President of North American Channel Development for cloud communications provider Star2Star , agrees that upfront effort to develop effective procedures can pay dividends. “We believe that if you would like repeatable and predictable revenue from partners, you have to offer them repeatable and predictable programs and processes.”

Best Practice 3: Designate Onboarding Process Responsibilities & Ownership

Select a point person, ideally a project manager, in your organization to manage onboarding for a given partner from start to finish. Establishing ownership eliminates confusion and creates accountability.

“This doesn’t mean the burden of onboarding falls on one person – it takes an interdepartmental effort to complete the process,” said Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “However, having one competent individual overseeing the effort will keep the process moving. They’ll know the onboarding status and loop in key parties to avoid delays.”

Best Practice 4: Gauge Partner Focus & Alignment with Your Company

Vendors have high hopes that every partner they bring onboard will become an advocate for their products and bring in tens of thousands of dollars in new monthly recurring revenue. These prized partners are out there, but it’s folly to believe that outstanding sales performance magically happens. In fact, our panel says vendor-partner alignment is a prerequisite to sales growth.

Chad Gagnon , Senior Channel Advisor at Evolve IP, starts an engagement by finding out where his company’s solutions fit into the partner’s go-to-market model. “Personally, I like to really understand the partner’s focus before anything else,” he says. “This allows me to make sure … what I review with them fits into their day-to-day.”

Intermedia’s Sheehan also recommends offering different paths for partners based on their interests. “Having a well-defined onboarding process with ‘tracks’ that address both the long-tail and the high-potential partners — and communicating it to partners upfront — is key to proper alignment.”

According to Gagnon, a key factor in determining alignment is comparing the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for both companies. “Once you are in sync with [the ICP], the focus and planning are easy,” Gagnon says. “You know the process is working well when you are top of mind for a partner and the opportunities are great fits.”

That said, not every partner you recruit is going to be a fit, which can be a tough pill to swallow after you’ve spent countless hours convincing and converting a prospective partner, only to have them not bring in any meaningful deals. Janet Schijns , CEO of channel consulting firm JS Group , reminds vendors that partner acquisition isn’t a numbers game.

Best Practice 5: Be Upfront About Your Solution’s Strengths (& Weaknesses)

Your “innovative, ground-breaking, revolutionary” solution typically has plenty of competition. So, you must help your partners understand how you compare and what sets you apart. Arm them with resources, including:

Hilary Gadda , Director of National Channel Development for TPx , a nationwide managed services provider, recommends cutting to the chase by outlining how your company can help them win deals. Instead of telling partners about everything in the portfolio, she explains in what situations TPx is a good fit or where “TPx shines” to help partners close deals. “Time is money for partners, and I need to respect that,” she says.

Best Practice 6: Provide Multiple Ways to Learn About Your Solutions

Keep in mind that people, including sales partners, don’t learn in the same way or at the same pace. Some partners would rather attend live scheduled training, while others prefer to watch video tutorials or read product guides in your learning management system (LMS) on their own time. Still, others are inclined to scour your partner portal and website for informative sales and channel marketing collateral .

Making multiple options available to your partners will cover your bases. Experiment with different formats and delivery methods to hit on the best curriculum.

Evolve IP’s Gagnon, for example, has found that live training works best if narrowly focused. “I like to set up multiple sessions with the team to help focus on one of our solution sets,” he says. “This keeps the sessions short and interactive, and the partners are more engaged.”

Intermedia’s Sheehan advocates self-service to accelerate results. “Providing effective self-service enablement via LMS in combination with a robust partner platform that facilitates sales and marketing engagement is fundamental for all partners to start selling quickly,” Sheehan says.

Best Practice 7: Work with Master Agents & Distributors to Collapse Timelines

Master agents and distributors often take on pre- and post-sales functions such as quoting, sales engineering, ordering, project management and installation for partners so they can shortcut some of the processes and start selling faster.

JS Group’s Schijns believes vendors should capitalize on distributor relationships to speed ROI. “Working with distribution is key for most vendors; they shorten that timeline for onboarding and save the vendor significant funds managing the channel at large through onboarding and first sale,” she said.

Best Practice 8: Monitor & Track Onboarding Performance & Feedback

No doubt your organization tracks CSAT scores, surveys customers and audits call center logs to ensure your customer-facing staff delivers top-tier service. Operate the same way with your partners.

“Having a process is great, but you have to monitor its effectiveness over time,” says Intermedia’s Sheehan. “To do that I’ve found it is critical to manage the entire channel development process, including onboarding, through business applications that enable you to monitor KPIs, identify trends and ensure positive outcomes.”

Best Practice 9: Remember to Be Human

When selling technology, it’s easy to forget that your “solution” is not only a piece of software or hardware; it’s also your people. And the character of your people can make or break the partnership.

“Yes, our business is tech, and we sell a product, but we are in the business of people,” says Zscaler’s McClure. “Nobody is loyal to companies. People are only loyal to people. A partner will not compromise for a partner program. They will compromise to demonstrate future success with you.”

In other words, if your people are pleasant and helpful, partners are more likely to want to work with your company even if your technology is not best-in-class, and they’re more likely to forgive an honest mistake on an order or install. On the other hand, if your team is difficult to reach or treats partners as second-class sellers, they’ll leave even if your solution is the market leader.

A mission statement is not enough; you need to demonstrate your people skills every day in many ways. When your software has a glitch, how do you handle incoming service calls? When your edge device gets shipped to the wrong address, how do you deal with that? Do you treat both your large enterprise and one-person shop partners with equal importance? Did you welcome and integrate your partner into your organization?

TPx’s Conrad drives this last point home: “It is important the partner feels like part of a community, not just a one-on-one relationship with one channel manager. A partner must feel comfortable with several areas of the company if they are going to put their business and their paycheck in your hands.”

9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices – Download

Below, download our one-pager to help these practices stay top of mind while creating your channel partner onboarding practice.

Following these tips can put you a step ahead of your competition in building and maintaining revenue-generating partner relationships.

Laz Gonzalez

Laz Gonzalez is Chief Strategy Officer at Zift Solutions. A prominent industry analyst and thought leader, Gonzalez brings unparalleled channel expertise to Zift and has served as strategic adviser to leading B2B channel programs worldwide.

Related Resources

6 Channel Enablement Best Practices for Partner Programs to Use in 2023

What is a Channel Account Manager & Why Do Channel Partner Programs Need Them?

6 Channel Management Best Practices Necessary for Success

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3 Steps to a Successful Channel Partner Program

Channel partnerships are a high impact strategy for growing your company and a good partnership can provide access to new customers and references that bring in business. Follow these action steps to define, refine and secure a channel partnership. Step 1: Determine a channel partnership

Clément cazalot, share article.

Channel partnerships are a high impact strategy for growing your company and a good partnership can provide access to new customers and references that bring in business.

Follow these action steps to define, refine and secure a channel partnership.

Step 1: Determine a channel partnership strategy

A channel partner distributes goods and services. There are three major types of channel partnership options to distribute your product.

1. You sell through your partner.

Product companies sell their product through a third party storefront. Retailers are partners to products they think will sell with their customers.

This is the case with AppExchange on Salesforce, the AppStore for Apple or any marketplace. Another classic example is GILT Groupe, who partners with brands like Calvin Klein and Quicksilver, providing distribution by promoting products at discounts. This is a powerful strategy, acting as a source of potential customers as your partner grows.

2. Your partner sells with you.

Here, partners sell your products as an upsell or missing value proposition. Any company that offers your service as a way to expand their offering fits into this category. For example, a car reseller might work with a bank to upsell a car loan, or a software vendor might complement its offering with another partner.

When Microsoft embeds an antivirus demo in its operating system, or when online services like Box bring in security providers to complement their enterprise offer, they are also employing this strategy.

3. Your partner sells for you.

Any partner acting as the promoter or seller of your product falls into this category. This partner is 1) a sales and marketing partner using marketing and sales resources to promote your product to new markets, or 2) a value added reseller, using your service as part of their own service offering. This provides additional value in the operation of that service, instead of simply selling it.

This is the case in any distribution partnership, from your local supermarket, to more traditional distributors. This is also the case in an OEM partnership, like Dell selling computers with Intel processors inside.

This scenario is the most complex because you have to make sure that your partner has an incentive to sell your product.

Step 2: Identify relevant partners and grade them

There are a number of factors to consider to ensure a partnership is relevant and profitable:

How well does your solution fit the need of the customer? How likely are your partner’s customers to purchase?

Once you have a good sense for each partners potential, score them:

Step 3: Develop a coherent plan for reaching these companies

Now that you have established criteria for partners, reach out to these companies and establish a connection. Here’s how: Start with companies that will take a chance with you.

B partners are more accessible than A partners. These partners may have a small, regional customer base but could be fast to work with, and willing to take on new products.

If your partner is selling your product, develop a relationship with their sales team. By doing this, they are more likely to suggest your product.

Develop a compelling value proposition and pitch it to that company. Position your company as a value add to the partner. Does your product help a company drive profits? Your offering should add revenue to your partner’s product line.

Step 4: Drive growth through your partners

Channel partners boost sales, decrease time to market, and provide access to competitive markets. So get started on building channel partnerships today.

Clement Cazalot ( @clementc ), co-founder & CEO of docTrackr – document control software for businesses and salespeople – that is distributed through channel partners like Microsoft SharePoint and Box. On Twitter: @docTrackr .

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Channel partner business plan

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The Essential Guide to Partner Planning

Build your partner planning framework.

Partner planning aims to have the right quantity of products in the right places at the right times to satisfy customer demand in an efficient, cost-effective manner. While the concept seems elementary on the surface, the complexity arises once you dig deeper. A channel leader must review their partner plan to ensure the strategy aligns with the company’s desired business outcomes.

Through years of experience and a rigorous approach, our team of channel experts at Spur Reply have identified five essential steps to guide partner planning.

Step #1: Understand the present strengths and weaknesses of current efforts

Step #2: know your growth levers, step #3 define the required ecosystem need, step #4 evaluate partner performance, step #5 create partner-level action plans.

Developing an understanding and maintaining a line of sight into the strengths and weaknesses of your channel strategy is integral to driving revenue acceleration through the partner channel. It is essential to review, analyze, and benchmark your teams’ and programs’ performance regularly and can be done using a model that examines 18 points of execution across six primary areas:

Are you set up to reach your strategic objectives?

Capacity planning: Do your existing partners deliver enough sales velocity to hit your targets?

Joint business planning : Are you ensuring your partners are aligned to the right goals?

Partner scoring : Do you know who the right partners are?

Have you created a model that will continually grow your base?

Partner business proposition : Is everyone aligned on the compelling reason you beat the competition?

Partner onboarding : Are you maximizing partner activations throughout your recruitment efforts?

Partner recruitment : Do you understand and act on the profile of your best possible candidates?

How good are your partners at selling your goods and services?

Campaign development : Do you know which partners are effective marketers of your solutions?

Go-to-market playbook : How aligned are your partners and field sellers to deliver unified joint sales?

Partner enablement : Are you arming your partners with the tools that help them with customers?

Are your costs-to-serve too high for you and your partners?

Channel incentives : Is your contra-revenue program driving value?

Deal registration : Does your program incentivize sales behavior or simply transfer margin?

Partner investment framework : Are you getting sufficient return on your other investments?

Do your programs keep partners loyal?

Cloud revenues structure : Have you made the same shift to the cloud as you expect from partners?

IP development : Do partners see you supporting their future IP development?

Partner program : Does your program deliver enough value to partners?

Do you execute most effectively and efficiently?

Partner co-selling model : Are you partner managers what’s expected?

Performance dashboard : Do you hold all stakeholders accountable to the same metrics?

Pipeline management : How central is managing a specific partner pipeline for your partner field sales?

Use these questions as a guide to review the performance of your channel programs. You should be able to classify the health of your channel processes as one of the following:

Formally benchmarking your programs and processes will then allow you to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your channel programs.

Another critical element of partner planning is the ability to diagnose channel performance against a vendor’s strategic product focus and growth model. Spur Reply has developed the Growth Profile TM Strategic Model to help map product priorities to sales and partner performance in a quantifiable manner. The model is composed of 4 quadrants to classify which products are in each stage of the growth cycle:

Incubate - Break into new markets and technology by concentrating on research and development efforts with a new or existing channel or direct resources.

Optimize – Maintain sales with programmatic reductions by redirecting resources from low-performing elements to higher-performing elements to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Perform – Maximize sales and current revenue flow with existing partners and direct sales resources.

Transform – Strengthen to scale or achieve performance leadership by recruiting new partners or adding additional direct sales resources.

Having a clear understanding of your growth profile is essential, as it quickly helps you determine the right strategic balance to recruit, grow, develop, or prune your direct and partner sales base.

Managing your partnership community to ensure it contains the right mix of partners is vital to sound channel management. Partner managers need to have both a full understanding of the company’s partner community and how to optimize the community’s performance — using five simple levers.

Planning should inform channel management activities such as data-driven models for recruitment and development, balancing engagements based on strategy and performance requirements, and testing partner business propositions across segments.

In the evolving channel space, leaders have limited resources to influence partners and meet business objectives, and a standard partner scoring system can boost partner value and returns. Partner scoring can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each partner, revealing opportunities for potential incentives, management, and scaling strategies.

We believe that partner scoring should be more than a forecasting tool. The framework can help increase sales, improve ROI, and re-direct partner behaviors to high-value actions. Spur Reply uses a three-step approach for calculating a Partner Evaluated Revenue Capacity (PERC) score, considering both current performance and potential for growth.

The PERC score allows you to create an action plan for partners and even extend the model to get more value. You can evolve from the core model and customize your PERC score, create better dashboards, compare like partners, simplify research, and strengthen capacity planning.

The final element of effective channel planning is partner business planning, which improves your ability to set goals, manage commitments, and drive partner performance against benchmarks.

We recommend you track partners and build out your channel management strategy in five key areas:

Business Model – The design of a partner’s business

Industry Importance – The partner’s focus area

Product Focus – The products the partner highlights and emphasizes

Program Membership – Partner program membership and status

Vendor Alignment – The vendors your partner is working with

By developing a firm understanding of these five aspects and leveraging data-driven insights to adjust strategies accordingly, companies can optimize their channel management strategy and accelerate revenue.

While each element of an effective channel plan is individually important, none are successful in silos. The elements of a high functioning channel plan are interrelated as they inform and influence one another.

Set the right goals

When contemplating a successful partner channel, the more partners the better, right? The more partners you have re-selling, the more revenue you and your company will enjoy.

Why more doesn’t always equal better

When it comes to your partner strategy, more is not necessarily better. At a certain point, the right kind of partner becomes more critical to the success of your channel than the quantity of partners.

Learn how to get a better, more measurable return from your partners with our whitepaper on successful channel management

Spur Reply recently worked on a project at a large software independent software vendor (ISV) that develops ERP and CRM solutions. The company wanted to adjust and refine its channel strategy, which was large, and through data analysis, it was clear that some trimming was necessary for two reasons: an unbalanced partner community and too many partners overall.

Creating balance in your partnership community

The right mix of large and small partners is an essential for a well-balanced channel program. Too many times, a customer would be best served by the right partner, but with a channel that is oversaturated with them, the perfect match doesn’t happen. Capacity planning and economic modeling can help you look beyond just the sticker price on a partner relationship.

Efficiently supporting your partners

Every partner, regardless of size, quality, or ambition, needs support. Whether it’s incident response, training, or marketing, partners management requires budget, and partners not driving revenue can easily eat up your support allocations. Plus, if your channel is oversaturated, you can end up with too many partners chasing a limited number of customers. Avoid having so many partners that it limits your return.

Benchmark your channel efforts against your direct sales

Both direct and indirect sales are essential elements of your go-to-market effort. Channel leaders must never forget the most important reason for an indirect sales motion is scale. You have partners because they help you win customers, drive sales, and enter markets where you wouldn’t otherwise have the presence or meet the cost structure.

In an age where new products are hitting the marketplace at an unprecedented rate, companies are tasked with the challenge of developing strategies to find the right partners to sell the right products at the right time. You can optimize channel revenue and profitability with a robust understanding of the stage of your product in the growth cycle.

However, before you can develop a channel strategy based on your product growth profile, you’ll need to understand the elements of the growth cycle and how each one influences channel decision making.

What is Product Growth Mapping?

Spur Reply has developed a proven system for product growth mapping called the Growth Profile Strategic Model. The model is built upon the idea that products fall into one of four quadrants: Incubate, Optimize, Perform, and Transform. The model helps you map your product priorities to your sales and partner performance in a quantifiable manner and optimize profitability for each product.

The axes of the graph you’ll create are labeled “Percentage of Total Revenue” (Y-Axis) and “Percentage Growth” (X-Axis). The elements of the graph and their descriptions are displayed on the grid in the following order:

Incubate – Break into new markets and technology by focusing on research and development efforts with a new or existing channel or direct resources (bottom left quadrant).

Optimize – Maintain sales with programmatic reductions by redirecting resources from low-performing elements to higher-performing elements to increase efficiency and effectiveness (bottom left quadrant).

Perform – Maximize sales and current revenue flow with existing partners and direct sales resources (top left quadrant).

Transform – Strengthen to scale or achieve performance leadership by recruiting new partners or adding additional direct sales resources (top right quadrant).

Thresholds to determine when products move from one quadrant to another are set based on company size, product offerings in the market, and the amount of revenue each product drives. A company with one great product bringing in most of the revenue may set their percentage of revenue threshold at 5% so that it will include more than one product. On the contrary, a company with several extensive offerings may set their threshold for this axis at 10% or 15%.

For this example, let’s say for a company the percentage of revenue threshold is 10%, and the percentage growth threshold is 5%. A product in the incubate phase is growing at a steady rate but does not yet make up more than 10% of the company’s total revenue. Products in the transform quadrant are those that drive more than 10 percent of the company’s revenue and are experiencing growth higher than the threshold of 5%. Performing products are typically great products already at scale, accounting for greater than 10 percent of total revenue, but the growth has plateaued and is below the 5% threshold. Products in the optimize quadrant are being phased out because they are not growing enough and make up less than 10% of revenue.

Now that you have a good grasp of the model, we can look at how this influences the channel strategy for each product.

Why is Product Growth Mapping important?

Having a clear understanding of your growth profile is essential. It quickly helps you determine how to recruit, grow, develop, or prune your direct and partner sales base and invest in each product in the most efficient manner.

An important piece of context is that growing sales through partners means you need to use one or more of these strategies:

Convince current partners selling a different product begin selling a new product

Leverage current partners sell more of that same product

Recruit entirely new partners who have never worked with you begin selling a new product

Every partner growth strategy uses these three significant engines, so keep them in mind as you choose partners to sell your products.

How Product Growth Mapping affects partner choice

Within each quadrant — and the corresponding growth cycle phase — there are typical partners that sell products in each.

Starting in the incubate stage, the chances of recruiting new partners to sell relatively new products is slim to none. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and chances are they aren’t overly familiar with the product. Instead, you will likely leverage partners you have worked with before and who you have an existing relationship. These partners often have a low-risk profile and have experience selling innovative products in an unproven marketplace.

In the transform quadrant, we see a completely different story. Now we rely on all three partner growth engines to sell a product. Current partners start to sell more of what they traditionally sold. Other partners are willing and excited sell a new product, and new companies from an entirely different space or an adjacent space view this as an attractive opportunity and jump in to sell the new product.

In the perform stage the product has reached maturation, and very few new partners are coming on because the market is already developed. The only exception is if the partner is a laggard in the marketplace, and this is the strategy they have adopted for this product. The focus here is to keep current partners selling, if possible, to stave off a deceleration of sales.

Once a product reaches the optimize quadrant, the strategy is to figure out how to pull back investment and roll partners off that product.

Also, channel managers need an investment model for each phase of the growth cycle. Most funds dedicated to product marketing should be focused on products in the incubate stage, even though they are bringing in little or no revenue as they ramp up. This money can be spent incenting partners or developing a joint venture to decrease the risk of selling a new, unproven product.

As you move through the model to transform and perform, you spend less money in each stage to fuel product growth because the products mature and gain traction in the market. As the product reaches the optimize quadrant, you want to invest as little as possible to keep the product afloat and devote resources toward the end of life milestones and rolling partners off that product. Having a consistent mathematical model that drives the investment strategy for the growth cycle is equally as important as having a sound partner engagement strategy in place.

Common mistakes to avoid

When developing investment and partner engagement strategies for different stages of the growth model, we often see two significant mistakes: selling a product before it’s ready to move from perform to optimize stage and developing an investment model based on the traditional cost-of-sale model.

The first mistake is incenting partners to sell a new product before a product is ready to move from the perform stage to the optimize stage. We often see new products cannibalize old ones, and sales of the old product are cut short because partners begin to focus all of their attention selling a new and exciting product. A vendor must be careful with their launch and incentive strategies to avoid this partner behavior.

The second major mistake we see is companies developing an investment model based on a traditional cost-of-sale model. Companies will spend their product marketing budget in the wrong quadrant, most often the perform quadrant, because it drives the most revenue. Instead, devote this budget towards a product in the incubate quadrant — even though the current revenue is low.

With technology changing so rapidly today, having a great product simply isn’t enough. You also need go-to-market efficiency and data-driven tools for managing partners and channel sales. Whether you are doing annual business planning or trying to determine your best partner strategy, knowing your growth profile is essential. You can quickly and efficiently assess which products are in the growth cycle and determine the right strategic balance to recruit, grow, develop, or prune your direct and partner sales base.

Roll it out to partners

Every business wants to accelerate its revenue, yet it’s a tough goal to reliably accomplish. Combining product advantage with go-to-market efficacy is the key to consistently achieving revenue acceleration.

You have a great product or solution but, in a market saturated with competition, you need an effective go-to-market and business plans to meet your goals.

How do you make planning valuable for both you and your partners?

The best partner business plans are mutually beneficial, helping both you and your partners to grow faster than your organic growth paths. To make sure the plans will deliver accelerated results, you’ll need to take a critical look at six areas of your business and answer the following questions:

Now that you have identified the necessary elements, it’s time to structure those them into a practical, adjustable plan. At Spur Reply, planning is a four-step process: assess, learn, plan, document.

Assess > Learn > Plan > Document

First, you need to set your goals and select your growth partners. It will require you to assess and analyze your partners’ growth profile. Specifically, you need to look at the difference between their organic growth and your desired growth for them. How can you get your partner’s growth up to a level that will reach or surpass your revenue goals?

Once you have your goals and growth partners set, you need to understand performance drivers and growth areas. Leverage the work you have already done for capacity planning and partner scoring to learn what you need from partners.

After you determine your most valuable partners, you can finally set up your plan . In this step, you will define business outcomes and partner commitment. A good business plan sets the right expectations by covering off on what the partner and vendor commit to across several components:

Partner Commitments

Vendor Commitments

Now that you have your plan, you’ll need to document it and both of your commitments correctly, which involves sharing the plan and driving performance accountability. By sharing the business plan in this way allows all stakeholders to review the plans (the partner, the partner’s account manager, and whoever has corporate responsibility for outcomes).

As you go through the planning and documentation process, leverage the opportunity to make sure you understand your partners.

First, use your partner business plan to develop profiles for your partners by collecting information that allows you to benchmark future performance. Then, make sure you have set up a timeframe with performance milestones, specific outcomes, and investments based on rewarding performance against commitments and completion criteria.

With your partner planning process set up and documented, make sure to track your performance against the 5Cs in your Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). Whether under, at, or exceeding goals, determine if you need to adjust the plan, reset the goals, or reallocate the investments.

No matter how developed your channel partner ecosystem, creating robust partner business plans will improve the go-to-market efficacy and revenue acceleration of your product.

Richard Flynn

1 925 750 8915

Partner Business Plans Management

With the Partner Business Planning module of ZINFI’s partner relationship management (PRM) platform, you can completely automate the development of business plans, streamlining interactions between internal and external channel partner stakeholders to ensure efficient plan execution and compliance.

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Partner Business Planning

Use the Partner Business Planning module to automate business planning activities in a multi-level channel ecosystem with an online form and approval flow process. You can also set up system alerts to notify channel partners when new business plan templates become available.

Using the module, channel partners can easily incorporate marketing plan details, then sign the business plan and push it for your approval through an expedient, automated, multi-level approval process. The reporting features of this module give you greater insight into the planned marketing activities initiated by your channel partners.

Key Features Include:

Certification & Training Management

The Partner Business Planning module allows you to designate channel partner specializations using the Certification and Training zone, where you can also instantly determine resource availability for any assistance a channel partner might require.

Channel partners can designate individuals for specific training programs organized by your organization to ensure teams get trained and certified on the appropriate products before marketing and sales activities begin. The Certification and Training zone gives you complete visibility into the resources needed for your product marketing and sales activities.

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3 Steps to Create a Winning Channel Partner Strategy
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Channel Partner Business Plan Template
Most importantly, you can be sure that your new channel partner business plan will meet global best practices. Trial the Certificate in Channel Sales. Trial the Certificate in Channel Management. The Channel Institute has trained and certified hundreds of channel business professionals globally.
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Partner engagement requires that asset- and partner-enablement processes are in place. In the first 30 days, you and your partner will learn about each other - including the value you can deliver your partners via incentives - and set goals. 60 days into your plan, you'll be educating customers and helping them start to sell your solutions.
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Similar to a standard business plan, a channel sales business plan explores the goals, intended strategies, associated costs, and other essential elements of a new project. Channel professionals can use this plan to communicate intentions for your partner program and get buy-in from leadership.
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Creating a professional reseller channel partner program is a big investment of time, effort, and resources. This is why it is essential that the partner program you want to create is aligned with the company strategy and business goals. This is also why it is essential to have executive support before you kick-off the process.
Create your business plan for partner
Partner Business Plan tool One of the tools we use with our small firm clients is the STAGe model. This is widely used to create 3-year or 12-month business plans for them. The good news is that it is versatile enough to help you create your 3-year partner business plan or 12-month partner business plan or vision for your practice.
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Channel managers can be turned into instant partner commitment development experts with guided tools to help them build 36-month business plans. Channel managers can gain across-the-board partner commitments for growth with user friendly 10-minute partner planning tools.
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Here are three reasons why channel partner onboarding strategies are important: Sets partners up for success. Providing channel partners with the right product know-how can accelerate successful customer interactions. Ensures across-the-board compliance.
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The key to a successful channel partnership is having a well-defined business strategy that helps you and your partner establish your goals and ensures that you are on the same page. Gaining the support of the rest of your organization and leadership team requires a channel sales business plan.
Channel Partner Programs: What They Are and How To Build One
There are a few basic steps a business can take to build a successful channel partner program that yields a high return on investment. These are: 1. Identify partners. ... Establish goals and create a written plan. In an effective channel partner program, each party assists in the goal-identification process and collaborates on writing a ...
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Define Partner journeys by cohort (size, tier, focus area, etc.) and leverage the appropriate mix of high touch, mid-touch, and tech touch tactics to engage Partners and ensure success at scale. Outcomes Planning Identify and agree upon criteria for success, set a clear action plan for achieving success, and track progress collaboratively
9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices to Set Partners Up for Success
The Importance of a Channel Partner Business Plan. A critical component of channel partner onboarding is developing a joint business plan outlining steps for partners, supported by your team, to reach short- and long-term goals from selling your solutions.
3 Steps to a Successful Channel Partner Program
Step 1: Determine a channel partnership strategy. A channel partner distributes goods and services. There are three major types of channel partnership options to distribute your product. 1. You sell through your partner. Product companies sell their product through a third party storefront. Retailers are partners to products they think will ...
Channel Partner Business Plan
Channel partner business plan Build capability to cater with our Channel Partner Business Plan. Be able to address growing demands. « » These PPT Slides are compatible with Google Slides Want Changes to This PPT Slide? Check out our Presentation Design Services Get Presentation Slides in WideScreen Features of these PowerPoint presentation slides :
The Essential Guide to Partner Planning
The final element of effective channel planning is partner business planning, which improves your ability to set goals, manage commitments, and drive partner performance against benchmarks. We recommend you track partners and build out your channel management strategy in five key areas: Business Model - The design of a partner's business
How to Write a Business Plan Template for a Broadcast Company Channel
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Extreme Networks
In this role, you'll combine partner management with business development and you'll manage business relationships with key partners and prospects to develop sales and growth initiatives. Principal Duties and Essential Responsibilities · Ownership of strategic short-term and long-term goals for the Channel partners in the region, through the ...