Your existing partner planning strategy is probably failing you. When you’re always reviewing past results, you miss out on opportunities to predict future success. It’s time to make a better plan, with the help of a joint action planning expert.
In my recent conversation with Qollabi’s Frie PĂ©trĂ© and Channelnomics’ Larry Walsh, we discussed the impact of planning and how to make partner success more predictable. Today, we’ll review takeaways from our webinar you can implement at your organization to better prepare for the upcoming year, including strategies for better partner planning, how to improve execution, and best practices for leveraging technology.
The Value of a Better Plan
Deloitte has found that the mere act of planning can improve your target achievement rate by 40%. Similarly, completing a mere 60% of your plan leads to a 135% target achievement rate. While planning can be powerful for organizations, current planning methodologies don’t adequately equip partner teams to achieve their growth potential.
QBRs focus on the past. Typically, they’re mostly leveraged for recapping the past quarter and reviewing data points for what has already happened. Consider a planning cycle where you’re operating three months behind, compared to a cycle acting on real-time data points. Undoubtedly, the efforts based on real-time data will be far more impactful.
In fact, conducting QBRs and snapshot planning is no longer an effective way to plan when the market is changing so rapidly. With resources available to always have access to in-the-moment data points, it’s essential to leverage these tools for ongoing planning and execution efforts. The best type of plan no longer looks back at what’s happened previously but instead peers into the to measure and predict your ongoing success.
Another key challenge with partner plans today is internal sabotage from a lack of alignment. Without internal alignment and strong communication streams, you will severely limit your ability to collaborate. Similarly, a lack of collaboration across teams and organizations will lead to silos and delayed results.
Developing Your End-of-Year Playbook
Today, ecosystems are ripe for disruption. Consider how in 2022, 49.4% of organizations attribute 26% or more of their revenue to partners. Similarly, Microsoft sees a whopping 95% of their revenue come from partners. With massive changes in play, it’s critical to anticipate and react to these disruptions.
Instead of conducting a fourth-quarter QBR, consider instead developing an End of Year Partner Playbook. Your Partner Playbook serves as an agile plan to achieve your program goals. As the year winds down, now is the perfect time to revisit your partner program goals and develop an effective plan for achieving them in the year to come.
Forging Focus
The best partner programs are relentlessly focused on a goal. Determine what you plan to do and what’s most important to your organization. Ask questions like:
- What are we hoping to achieve?
- What is our overarching goal?
- What are our non-negotiables?
- What’s our single most critical goal?
After establishing your baseline, you must align internally around your focus. Ensure the rest of your organization understands your purpose and what it means to them.
Define Objectives & Key Results
Next, it’s time to quantify your plan with OKRs. Establishing OKRs is an invaluable way to get both organizations on the same page and working toward a shared goal. With OKRs, you can track your progress, while promoting internal engagement.
At times, it can be challenging to see how smaller tasks ladder up to big-picture goals. With established, shared OKRs, each team member can easily see how each action they take contributes to the organization as a whole.
Establish strong OKRs by starting with your focus. The best OKRs shine a spotlight on a specific goal, instead of a floodlight on an organization’s initiatives. Consider your organization’s focus and the different outcomes that can be tied to it. Meanwhile, be sure to steer away from documenting specific outputs, or tasks, which can steer you away from your main goal.
For example, if your focus is on improving customer retention rates, an outcome could be increased NPS or a rise in contract expansions. Meanwhile, outputs to avoid include conducting 25 customer satisfaction surveys and meeting with customers with an NPS lower than 8.
This change in mindset is critical — focusing on outcomes will keep your plan agile and ensure your team can experiment to achieve growth. Throughout the year, you and your partner can optimize actions and outputs to ensure you reach your goals.
Create Commitment & Accountability: MAPs
With your OKRs in place, it’s time to create a mutual action plan (MAP). A MAP is different from a QBR in a few key ways. Most notably, a MAP is more effective for driving commitment and accountability.
To create your MAP, start by breaking down overarching OKRs into smaller goals and tasks for each team and stakeholder. Initially, focus on creating smaller goals, then develop specific tasks regularly based on what’s working and what isn’t.
Leverage a shared platform, like your PRM or project management tool, to organize all tasks and share real-time progress. Each responsible party should be tagged within your platform, and they’re responsible for providing updates as the project progresses. Once a task is completed, or a milestone is achieved, it should be marked accordingly. This will allow all stakeholders to see where the initiative is progressing and which areas need more attention.
If your program isn’t mature enough to have a PRM in place, you can get started with a simple Google Sheets document. This template from Qollabi is a great example of a thorough mutual success plan, built and managed in a spreadsheet.
During the execution phase, your team must revisit goals regularly to ensure they’re tracking toward progress, aligned with what other teams are working on, and making an impact. If the team decides specific tasks are no longer beneficial or applicable, it’s time to adjust the plan accordingly to ensure you stay on track to accomplish your OKRs.
Effectively Leverage Technology to Plan for 2023
As you go into 2023, it’s critical to leverage technology to improve your efforts. Tools can help forge internal alignment, track progress toward outcomes, and drive unparalleled growth.
Project Management & Planning Tools
When your teams and partners work in silos, it’s impossible to know what each other is working on or the outcomes achieved. Project and partner management systems enable real-time collaboration, instill accountability, and provide deep insights into program results.
If you don’t yet have the budget for advanced tools, get started with shared Google Spreadsheets. This will help you build the foundation for strong MAPs, while ensuring all stakeholders have access to the ongoing project plan.
It’s critical to leverage channel management tools across the entire project lifecycle, from planning to collaboration, through measurement and reporting.
Online Knowledge Sharing
I’ve achieved a lot in my career that I would never have been able to without the knowledge of others. In partnerships, we’re so lucky to have such a strong culture of collaboration where most everyone is willing to share the strategies that work best for them and their programs.
Keep your ear to the ground and seek out trends within the industry. Experiment with new strategies regularly, and document the results. Don’t be afraid to shift your efforts when you find new ways to drive more results.
Grow Your Partner Program in 2023
By optimizing your partner program planning efforts now, you can drive greater success in the long run. Remember to plan around outcomes, not outputs, and seek to forge alignment internally and externally. Leverage technology to keep all of your stakeholders bought-in and aligned.
Watch the full meet-up with Frie Petre to hear all of his insights on planning with Qollabi. Take your partner efforts to the next level when you sign up for Partner Playbooks workshops.