Introduction

Business plans serve as a foundational framework that aligns the operational strategy of your partner firms with your partner program and the company's overarching goals and expectations. Tailored for each partner, these plans outline specific sales, marketing, and training objectives that perfectly sync with your organization’s aspirations. These plans are indispensable tools for effectively overseeing your network, enabling you to evaluate and measure performance continually and, as needed, take strategic actions to bolster your partners on their path to success.

By collaboratively constructing business plans in conjunction with each partner, you foster a sense of cohesion within your indirect sales ecosystem. This shared roadmap ensures that all partners are working in synergy, collectively pursuing the identified actions necessary for accomplishing mutual success, further strengthening the strategic alignment between your firm and its partner network. Successful partnerships are built on trust, open communication, and a shared vision, essential for effective joint business planning.

Revenue growth is a key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of joint business plans, highlighting the significance of fostering partner-driven revenue growth through collaborative initiatives.

Develop Partner Business Plan: Two Key Steps to Consider

1. Know Your Partners Well

A thorough understanding of your partner network is a fundamental prerequisite for the successful development of partner business planning. Within your indirect sales ecosystem, business providers, integrators, value-added resellers (VARs), IT service companies, and resellers operate within distinct logic and economic models. Acquiring deep insights into the nuances of each partner type is crucial for crafting business plans that align with your partner’s strategic objectives and your company’s overarching goals.

Ensuring all stakeholders agree about their key objectives fosters cooperation and minimizes conflicts in joint business planning.

Isabelle Castellanet, the founder of IXC, a firm specializing in Partners and Growth, emphasizes the importance of recognizing partners' diverse expectations and requirements based on their typology. She notes, “Depending on the typology of its network and available resources, it is important to see that the partners do not expect the same information. A wholesaler, for example, does not require the same information and tools as a VAR, an integrator, or even a third-party publisher who prescribes or resells for you.”

Recognizing these key elements in partner business planning ensures that your efforts are tailored to cater to each partner category's specific needs and expectations, ultimately fostering a more productive and mutually beneficial collaboration. Understanding these essential elements and diverse expectations and requirements is critical for effective partner management.

2. Have a Well-Defined Global Business Objective

Creating a robust business plan in collaboration with your partner necessitates a well-defined and quantifiable overarching business objective. This objective must be crystal clear and expressed in measurable terms. For instance, it could be aimed at achieving specific milestones, such as:

• Capturing more than 20% of the market share in France for your product;
• Reaching an annual turnover target of “X” amount or;
• Expanding your operations to attain 5% of the turnover in a new country.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) also serve as measurable benchmarks for evaluating progress, allowing you to assess and adjust strategies effectively.

This overarching business objective is the cornerstone upon which you will construct the business plans tailored for each partner. The core concept is to apportion individual objectives to your partners that harmonize with your global strategy. Consequently, each partner’s unique business plan becomes an instrumental component contributing to fulfilling your company’s overarching business objective. This strategic alignment ensures that the combined efforts of your partner network work in unison to advance your business toward its ultimate goals, fostering mutual growth through strategic partnerships.

Establishing a Partner Business Plan: The Objectives

Setting objectives within your partner’s business plan is essential, engaging, and decisive for the partnership's success. A customer-centric approach ensures that strategies are aligned with consumer needs and preferences. Aligned with your business's primary objective, these measurable objectives, whether quantitative or qualitative, must be measurable and, therefore, quantifiable.

It is also crucial to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) strategically designed to drive revenue. This involves aligning expectations and creating meaningful metrics that contribute to financial growth.

Set Quantitative Targets

Based on a careful analysis of historical sales performance, specific criteria such as outcomes, geographical location, and seniority within the partner network, distinct revenue goals will be strategically allocated to each partner. These objectives encompass a variety of key areas that guide their contributions to the partnership, with a particular emphasis on monitoring and optimizing sales activities:

1. Business Objectives on Sales Volume and Turnover: Partners will be tasked with well-defined business goals related to sales volume and revenue generation. These objectives may be tailored to the partner’s track record, the market potential in their location, and their historical sales figures. This approach ensures that targets are realistic and achievable, motivating partners to excel in their specific market segments.
2. Marketing Objectives through Event and Webinar Organization: In addition to sales targets, partners will be entrusted with marketing objectives, often organizing events and webinars. These events are crucial touchpoints for engaging potential customers and driving brand awareness. The specific objectives may vary depending on the partner’s strengths and past performance, encouraging them to leverage their marketing expertise to enhance the partnership’s overall success.

Entering new markets is also a significant part of the strategy. Channel leaders must identify and capitalize on opportunities in various markets, ensuring effective partner relationships to penetrate these areas successfully.

By customizing these objectives based on partner history and characteristics, the partnership becomes more adaptable and efficient, with each partner playing a unique role in contributing to the collective success of the collaboration. This tailored approach maximizes the potential for growth and achievement within the network.

Set Qualitative Objectives

Incorporating qualitative objectives into your business plan imparts a heightened professionalism to your partner network. This is especially pivotal when embarking on new indirect sales partnerships. Training sessions play a central role in this process, serving as a crucial avenue for partners to equip their sales teams with comprehensive knowledge about your brand. These sessions elevate your partners’ understanding of your products and empower them to embrace and disseminate your vision over the short, medium, and long-term horizons.

Identifying emerging opportunities through these training sessions is essential for staying ahead in a dynamic market. This alignment ensures that they are seamlessly integrated into your strategic framework. As an illustrative example, you may set a target within your business plan, such as achieving a certification for a specific number of “X” sales.

Implementing KPIs is imperative to ensure the optimal monitoring of your business plan and gauge your partners' progress. These quantifiable benchmarks enable you to assess the attainment of objectives, offering valuable insights into areas where potential refinements or additional support may be necessary. Joint business planning is crucial in setting these KPIs, ensuring that both parties are aligned and accountable. By embracing KPIs, you introduce a structured, data-driven approach that ensures the partnership remains on a well-tracked trajectory toward realizing the objectives outlined in your business plan.

Have Regular Monitoring

In pursuit of ongoing refinement and shared operational efficiency, these objectives must be periodically defined and subject to regular monitoring. Constructing a business plan without a system for ongoing objective assessment is a critical oversight, as it can become too late to take corrective action should your partner deviate from their established objectives. To ensure the long-term success of your collaborative efforts, it’s highly advisable to assess and potentially adjust objectives every month, accounting for variances such as market changes or weaker performance in a specific month, such as August. Regular monitoring and adjustments can significantly enhance the market impact of your collaborative ventures, ensuring alignment with evolving business goals and market conditions.

KPIs play a pivotal role in facilitating the monitoring and analysis of your partners, allowing you to identify their strengths and areas that may require improvement. With a monthly review and a systematic reporting mechanism, you gain the capability to:

1. Set Realistic Objectives: By closely aligning objectives with the current conditions, you ensure that they remain practical and attainable in the context of evolving market dynamics.
2. Monitor Implementation and Achievement: Regular KPI tracking enables you to gauge how well partners execute planned actions and progress towards the predefined objectives, offering insights into areas that might need attention.
3. Provide Support: Armed with this detailed data, you are better equipped to initiate timely and targeted actions that can help partners overcome challenges and, in turn, assist them in reaching their objectives. This proactive approach ensures that your partnership remains adaptive and robust, fostering sustained success in a dynamic business landscape.

In the endeavor to establish a comprehensive business plan and ensure its effective management with complete transparency into your partner’s activities, a PRM, or Partner Relationship Management system, emerges as the quintessential tool. Going beyond the capabilities of conventional management software, a PRM empowers you to systematically structure your indirect sales processes and engage with your partner ecosystem in real time, irrespective of the hour or location.

When crafting business plans for your partners within a proficient PRM platform, you can expect to benefit in several key ways:

1. Tailored Business Plans: A robust PRM system should facilitate the seamless definition of unique business plans for each partner, accommodating their specific objectives, strengths, and market dynamics. This tailored approach ensures that each partner’s plan is finely tuned to optimize success.
2. Real-Time Progress Tracking: The PRM offers the invaluable advantage of real-time progress tracking for the objectives set within these business plans. It lets you stay updated on your partner’s performance, offering insights into their achievements and areas that might require attention or support.
3. KPI Integration: Effective PRM systems seamlessly integrate KPIs into the platform, providing you with a set of critical metrics that pinpoint what is vital for the success of your partner’s business plan. These KPIs allow you to focus on the most significant aspects of your partnership, enabling data-driven decision-making and strategic adjustments as needed.

By leveraging a PRM, your business can optimize its partnership management, ensuring that business plans are efficiently established and actively tracked and adjusted as necessary, fostering the mutual success of your company and partner network.