We conducted an Opportunity Assessment and Strategic Alignment initiative for an OT client, laying the foundation for a scalable and sustainable channel model in their industrial services business.

📖 Client Overview

A Fortune 500 operational technology company focused on the energy management and automation industry.

💰 Annual revenue: ~$39B

🎯 Project domain: Channel Development

🌎 Geo scope: South Pacific

🔬 Situation

The client aimed to capitalize on a significant growth opportunity in the services channel across the Pacific Zone. Despite a strong belief in the channel’s potential, gaps in the operating model, varied expectations, and internal challenges hindered the realization of a cohesive and scalable services strategy. Key challenges included:

• Low attach rates for concurrent services, with significant untapped potential in non-concurrent services.

• Limited enablement and motivation for channel partners to sell services effectively.

• Fear of product cannibalization and internal misalignment on channel strategy.

The objective was to build a multi-year services channel plan, starting with a comprehensive opportunity assessment and extending to strategy development and deployment.

✍🏼 Our Approach

• Opportunity Assessment

  • Conducted a detailed SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the channel operating model.

  • Analyzed attach rates, service ratios, and RTM (route-to-market) mix to uncover growth levers for services across the lifecycle.

• Strategic Alignment and Planning

  • Designed guiding principles for a services channel model, balancing immediate revenue growth with long-term strategic investments.

  • Created a multi-stage roadmap, including defining the partner play, value proposition, and incentive structures.

📈 Impact

• Identified a pathway to build a €10M annual services channel run rate within two years.

• Unlocked new revenue streams by enabling partners to sell non-concurrent services, increasing attach rates across RTMs.

• Achieved greater alignment among internal stakeholders, ensuring buy-in across business units.

To know more, reach out to us at curious@ontopraxis.ai

We collaborated with a leading hyperscaler and empowered their partners with the tools, strategies, and support needed to succeed in the competitive public cloud market. This engagement addressed immediate marketing challenges and laid the foundation for sustained partner-driven growth.

📖 Client Overview

Part of a Fortune 10 tech company offering a new way to the cloud.

💰 Annual revenue: ~$33B

🎯 Project domain: Partner Marketing

🌎 Geo scope: Asia Pacific & Japan

🔬 Situation

The client faced challenges in enabling its partners to capitalize on the growing public cloud market. Research revealed key constraints hampering marketing execution: a lack of intent, talent, and content. To address these gaps, the client sought a strategic initiative to empower its partners and accelerate time to value.

✍🏼 Our Approach

• Strategic Alignment

  • Collaborated with the client to design and implement a partner demand generation engine, aligning it with the organization’s business and sales priorities.

  • Identified and addressed the unique challenges of partner marketers, focusing on intent-building and content optimization.

• Customized Marketing Support

  • Developed personalized marketing plans for partners, optimizing existing strategies to deliver higher ROI.

  • Provided hands-on guidance to improve demand generation efforts, including recommending suitable marketing packages and agencies.

• Comprehensive Execution Assistance

  • Supported campaign execution by facilitating agency selection, brief creation, and implementation oversight.

  • Ensured smooth collaboration by acting as an escalation point for agency-related issues.

• Capability Building

  • Enhanced partner marketing skills through the sharing of best practices and knowledge.

  • Curated impactful content and resources to support effective marketing campaigns.

📈 Impact

• Enhanced Marketing Outcomes

  • Partners praised the high-quality content, immersive experiences, and tailored support, leading to improved marketing execution.

• Optimized Marketing Fund Utilization

  • Enabled better and more effective use of marketing funds by aligning investments with targeted strategies and high-impact campaigns.

• Partner Testimony

  • Partners consistently highlighted our role in simplifying campaign execution, improving marketing strategy, and enhancing team coordination.

To know more, reach out to us at curious@ontopraxis.ai

We worked with an IT Infrastructure and Services client to build and implement a channel plan for scaling their managed
services offering through their global partner ecosystem.

📖 Client Overview

A Fortune 500 technology company with the purpose to advance the way people live and work.

💰 Annual revenue: ~$27B

🎯 Project domain: Channel Sales

🌎 Geo scope: Global

🔬 Situation

The IT marketplace is shifting towards a service-led model, and our client, recognizing this trend, aimed to establish a thriving managed services partner ecosystem. To achieve this, they needed a comprehensive plan to attract and nurture partners, ultimately expanding their market reach through indirect channels.

✍🏼 Our Approach

Our approach centered on achieving full operating model alignment, going beyond just sales alignment, and encompassed the following:

• Market analysis: A deep dive into market dynamics to identify opportunities and challenges.

• Strategic partner positioning: Defining clear roles and value propositions for each partner type.

• Collaborative workshops: Joint sessions with partners to foster alignment and build relationships.

• Sales enablement: Equipping partners with the tools and knowledge for success.

• Demand generation support: Providing resources to drive leads and stimulate market demand.

📈 Impact

A well-documented plan facilitated leadership alignment, secured sponsorship, and garnered investment to support this multi-year initiative.

We also established an incubation program, offering hands-on guidance to partners dedicated to collaboratively developing their managed services practice with the client.

To know more, reach out to us at curious@ontopraxis.ai

We partnered with a leading technology company to design and execute a content strategy for their annual flagship marketing event, empowering partner marketers to become future-ready.

📖 Client Overview

A Fortune Top 50 technology company with the purpose to create technologies that drive human progress.

💰 Annual revenue: ~$94B

🎯 Project domain: Partner Marketing

🌎 Geo scope: Asia Pacific & Japan

🔬 Situation

The client sought innovative ideas and a content strategy to drive strategic alignment and empower their partner marketers.

✍🏼 Our Approach

Focusing on the target personas, we crafted a balanced approach combining Outside-in and Inside-out perspectives to foster seamless marketing and sales collaboration. Our plan featured insightful, inspirational, and actionable content on achieving commercial excellence.

📈 Impact

• Engaged over 500 participants during a two-day virtual event.

• Partners praised the high-quality content, interactive engagement, and immersive experience.

• Enabled the client to transition from articulating value to creating value.

To know more, reach out to us at curious@ontopraxis.ai

In the fast-paced world of technology, partnerships aren't just strategic...they're existential. With estimates suggesting that 70-80% of business flows through partners, the importance of efficient channel management cannot be overstated. Salesforce research underscores this, with 84% of sales professionals acknowledging that partner collaborations are driving more significant revenue impacts than in the past. But managing those partnerships? That's where things get complex.

Key aspects of this complexity include:

• Multiple vendors: Partners often deal with numerous vendors, each with their own portfolio of products, sales strategies, marketing materials, operational requirements, and enablement programs.

• Diverse customers: Partners must cater to various customer segments, including IT decision-makers, finance departments, procurement teams, and end-users, each with unique needs and expectations.

• Internal organizational complexity: Within their organizations, partners juggle roles and responsibilities across various departments, including sales, marketing, operations, and enablement, adding another layer of complexity to their operations.

The traditional playbook is outdated. We're drowning in data, struggling to meet partner needs, and losing valuable time to operational friction.

This is where PartnerGrok comes in. It's not just another tool; it's a catalyst. An AI-powered copilot designed to transform your channel into an intelligent, synchronized, revenue-generating machine.

The Power of Synthesis AI

PartnerGrok leverages the power of Synthesis AI, a new wave of generative AI applications focused on decision advantage. By converging information from various sources, PartnerGrok provides actionable insights and automates tasks, enabling channel chiefs to make informed decisions and optimize their partner strategies.

Here’s how PartnerGrok can help drive productivity gains:

• Personalized partner journeys: It can tailor interactions for each partner and their specific personas, anticipating their needs and providing relevant content and training.

• Real-time support and insights: It can offer immediate assistance with inquiries, deal registration, troubleshooting, and more, using data analysis to identify potential roadblocks and opportunities.

• Enhanced collaboration: It will facilitate seamless communication between your company and partners, streamlining processes like MDF management, co-marketing campaigns, and lead sharing.

• Predictive analytics: It will analyze partner data and market trends to predict potential churn, identify high-potential partners, and suggest personalized growth strategies.

• Ontology-powered Intelligence: It will leverage ontology to understand the context of partner interactions, make accurate predictions and recommendations, and streamline workflows.

The Renaissance of Partnership powered by AI

The B2B sales landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Heightened competition, evolving buyer expectations, and economic uncertainty are forcing organizations to re-evaluate their go-to-market strategies. 

The channel ecosystem has grown in scale and complexity, yet remains a critical avenue for driving growth and achieving cost-effective sales.

As Channel Chiefs, you are the architects of your organization’s partner ecosystem, responsible for navigating the complexities of channel relationships, driving growth, and ensuring alignment between partners and customers. 

The age of intelligence is here, and it's time to seize the opportunity.

UPDATE: Nov 26, 2024: Announcing AWS Partner Assistant, a generative AI-powered virtual assistant for AWS Partners1

Embarking on the journey

The path forward demands clarity and strategic vision.

• Define your north star: Establish clear objectives and identify the guiding principle to shape your channel strategy.

• Prioritize use cases: Focus on the areas where Synthesis AI can deliver the most immediate and impactful value.

• Start small, scale fast: Initiate proof-of-concepts to validate the technology's potential. With each success, expand its capabilities and empower your channel team.

A new future of channel management is here. Embrace it with Synthesis AI.

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“Doing more with less” has become an organization-wide mantra, not just for improving productivity through technology but also for reducing departmental budgets without resetting growth expectations.

When we look at the marketing function, a Gartner survey shows a decline in marketing spend as a percentage of revenue in 2024, putting CMOs under pressure to deliver growth with far fewer resources. Consequently, there has been a secular shift towards digital spending (57.1% of the marketing spend).

This rationalization snowballs into the budget for the partner marketing function, which spends a significant portion of its “To Partner” marketing funds on digital interactions.

Operating in this reality requires a better understanding of the spending outcomes/impact while improving the partner engagement experience. This duality presents partner marketers with the challenge of reaping the full potential of their digital outreach and engagement efforts with partners.

Let’s look at webinars. A study shows significant growth in webinar spending, reaching 4.4B in 2025, a 23.1% CAGR over 2020. Advanced data reporting, accessibility, reach, ease of use, reduced travel, and sustainability are the primary growth vectors putting the overall market on a high growth trajectory.

Webinars have become less about information dissemination and more about immersive experiences. With the surge in virtual events and remote collaboration, organizations must adapt their strategies to captivate and retain audience attention in a highly competitive digital landscape.

Sadly, most of the effort goes into audience acquisition and very little into understanding audience engagement during and after the session. We only focus on transactional metrics like the number of registrations, conversions, and post-event C-SAT surveys. Leaders celebrate attendance count with little attention to the impact. There is no genuine desire to understand the event and post-event engagement with the partners and track subsequent behavior changes or desired outcomes.

Analyzing additional metrics such as time spent on the webinar, participant feedback, on-demand views, downloads, repeat visitors, and audience engagement throughout the webinar can help organizations tailor their content and delivery for better results.

For instance, tracking on-demand views and downloads indicates the long-term value of the webinar content and can inform future content strategy. This data-driven approach ensures that webinars effectively meet the needs of partners and contribute to achieving business objectives.

Post-webinar analytics is as good as pre-webinar readiness in defining, tracking, and measuring engagements across the webinar lifecycle. Taking an Ontology-based approach can help us better define and understand the mechanics and drive proper instrumentation across the engagement lifecycle.

Partner Webinar Engagement Ontology

The ontology serves as a knowledge map, providing a structured and standardized way to represent the complex information involved in partner webinar engagement. It facilitates communication and collaboration between stakeholders, aids in data analysis and decision-making, and enables a deeper understanding of the entire process.

This specific ontology maps out the entire lifecycle of a partner's interaction with a webinar, starting from the Pre-webinar stage and progressing through attendance, engagement, and post-webinar actions. It also includes the various attributes associated with each stage, such as the webinar topic, format, reseller details, persona type, and actionable outcomes.

The ontology provides several benefits for understanding and managing partner experience within a webinar program:

• Granular view of partner engagement: It allows the organization to track how different partner types and personas interact with webinars at each stage. This insight can help tailor marketing and content to specific partner needs.

• Targeted marketing and content: By understanding partner interests and personas, the marketing team can create more relevant and engaging webinars, increasing registration and attendance rates.

• Improved partner experience: The ontology helps identify areas where partners might need additional support or resources, leading to a more positive and productive relationship.

• Data-driven decision-making: The structured data collected through the ontology can be analyzed to measure the effectiveness of webinar programs, identify areas for improvement, and optimize resource allocation.

• Increased Revenue Generation: Effective partner webinars equip partners with the knowledge and resources they need to sell more effectively, leading to increased revenue for both the vendor and the partner.

Ultimately, webinar success is a collective outcome of Content, Speaker, Experience, Engagement, and Analytics.

The shift from focusing on the optics to understanding the deeper immersion of partners through an ontological lens offers a paradigm shift in partner engagement strategies.

By understanding the deeper structures of meaning and interaction, businesses can foster authentic, lasting relationships beyond transactional metrics. As we move into an era defined by complexity and interconnectedness, an ontological approach offers a pathway to unlock the full potential of partnerships.

Additional reference

• The Ultimate List of Webinar Statistics

• Beyond Cargo Cult: Building Real Hi-Tech Partnerships

In the tech world, partnerships are often seen as a silver bullet to boost sales rapidly. This often leads to a copycat mentality, where companies mimic their peer's partnership play without considering the underlying strategy. These well-intentioned efforts can sometimes fall into the trap of cargo cult partnership building. Inspired by a fascinating historical event, Cargo Cult reveals a flawed strategy prioritizing form over function.

Here's the story behind the term:

During World War II, Pacific islanders (the indigenous Melanesians) witnessed a marvel – planes delivering supplies to US troops. They saw rituals (soldiers marching, signaling) followed by "cargo" (supplies). When the war ended, the planes stopped coming. Confused, the islanders mimicked the rituals, building mock landing strips and control towers, hoping to bring back the cargo.

Just like the islanders, some companies see successful partnerships and think the magic lies in mimicking rituals, not understanding the actual cause and effect. They throw money at partners, focus on agreement signings, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and ceremonial partner engagements, or chase dazzling financial metrics, all while forgetting the core purpose – solving a real problem for their joint customers. Here's the breakdown:

• The Cargo Cult: Flashy partnerships or trendy technologies become the "cargo." Companies chase these things without understanding what actually created success in other partnerships.

• Mimicking Rituals: They throw resources at replicating the surface – hiring for specific titles, adopting certain tools, co-branding, joint events, and undifferentiated partner programs  – but miss the deeper connections and strategic alignment that led to success elsewhere.

• Missing the Point: The real "magic" lies in solving a shared problem, creating value together, and building genuine trust. Cargo Cult partnerships lack these foundations and often fizzle out.

• Focusing on Superficial Metrics: Companies might prioritize flashy statistics like the number of partnerships or the combined revenue potential, ignoring the actual fit and synergy between partners.

This approach is flawed. Here's why:

• Focus on substance, not theatrics: True partnerships are built on shared goals, complementary strengths, and clear communication.

• Metrics matter, but context is king: Financial metrics are valuable but shouldn't be the sole measure. Did the partnership solve a customer pain point? Did it create a win-win situation?

• Lack of Strategic Alignment: Partnerships built solely on numbers might not share long-term goals or have a clear plan for achieving mutual success. This can lead to disjointed efforts and, ultimately, limited impact.

• Customer Disconnect: Partnerships focused solely on sales figures might neglect the customer's true needs. Such partnerships may fizzle out without a focus on solving customer problems or offering unique value propositions.

Let’s abandon cargo cult “solutions.” Recognize there is no process, and it will be painful. - Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir Technologies

The Antidote - Building Bridges, Not Just Landing Strips

• Identify the real problem: Before diving into partnerships, clearly define the challenge you want to address.

• Seek complementary strengths: Look for partners who bring unique skills and expertise to the table.

• Focus on value creation: How will this partnership benefit your customers and your company?

• Open communication is vital: Regularly discuss goals and progress and adapt as needed.

• Metrics that Matter: Track metrics that reflect the success of the partnership in achieving its goals, not just superficial numbers.

Partnerships are a powerful growth lever, but they're not magic cargo. By avoiding the Cargo Cult trap and focusing on genuine connections and shared value, Hi-Tech companies can build partnerships that deliver real results. The only measure of a successful partnership that counts is the final outcome—Customer Success.

This write-up is inspired by 's article "Technology is the Problem." The author argues that companies mimic what other successful companies do without understanding the root cause of success.

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This report addresses two essential questions in growing IT Managed Services through a symbiotic partner ecosystem:

1. Why should channel partners consider building a Managed Services practice?
2. How can Hi-Tech vendors leverage the indirect ecosystem to scale their Managed Services offering?

Market volatility, geopolitical situations, and increased economic uncertainties are compelling organizations, both large and small, to explore adjacencies that help them survive and thrive. The IT Channel ecosystem has been equally impacted by these headwinds, forcing partners to search for new value pools.

As per McKinsey research^[1], companies that have made business building a top strategic priority have grown more quickly than other organizations during periods of high economic volatility. (Approximately 10% above market growth rate)

Adopting the business-building mental model is vital for channel partners to future-proof their business. It's time for partners to demonstrate strategic courage in navigating the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world. Hi-Tech vendors and partners should take note of this and work together to build adjacencies that propel them forward.

A high-potential segment to consider would be Managed Services. Simply put, it is the practice of removing the undifferentiated IT heavy lifting from the customer, allowing them to focus on their core business. This idea has evolved since the 1990s and is becoming increasingly relevant to customers, as the landscape shifts from a people-centric to a platform-centric approach. Global research indicates (Exhibit 1) that this market presents tremendous growth opportunities (13.6% CAGR, 2023-2030) in the near and long term.

Forces Shaping Managed Services

The need for customers to lower their IT Operational costs and invest in Innovation (Exhibit 2) is fueling this growth in the managed services segment. This, coupled with factors such as hybrid work growth, multi-cloud adoption, increased cybersecurity risk, and the need to meet regulatory & compliance requirements, has further accelerated the need to optimize IT management.

McKinsey research^[1] suggests that IT leaders are most likely to seek help from external IT providers to access talent and Innovation. This operating model allows them to focus their limited resources on core competencies and partner with managed services providers (MSPs) to deliver IT-enabled business outcomes.

Delivering on the promise of IT agility with stability and resiliency is no longer a solo sport. Successful companies build a symbiotic ecosystem of partners to co-create solutions that deliver superior customer experiences. Hi-tech vendors must embrace this reality and bring along their capable partners in creating customers for life.

For partners, this unlocks incremental opportunities for value capture through greater customer stickiness, better visibility into customer utilization and potential needs, and reduces competitive pressure, resulting in increased customer lifetime value. And lastly, the predictable, recurring, and multiplier effect on partner earnings can help them weather economic storms.

Based on our implementation experience, we highly recommend that vendors adopt a guided and assisted approach built on the trifecta of the Right Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset. Getting this correct ensures vendors stay aligned or risk being forever behind; hence, they need to be the steward of this approach.

The Right Mindset

Mental model required to select and onboard partners

The critical first step is to identify the right set of partners committed for the long term. While much of this is an art based on existing relationships, we recommend a data-driven approach to assess their partnering behavior and existing capabilities (Exhibit 3).

Shortlisted partners should be onboarded programmatically into a sandbox environment. This ensures they have the proper understanding, risk appetite, and support through the learning curve.

Vendors should deliberate while defining the partner readiness journey. Given the complex nature of the Managed Services business, it can’t be treated as a transactional sale. Vendors must start with strategic alignment and lay out the rest of the joint Go-to-market plan.

Remember to keep the plan simple and focus more on the implementation. The schema below (Exhibit 4) outlines this approach in greater detail and calls for a well-curated incubation and activation program. The onboarding journey ensures that partners progressively build the right capabilities, leaving little margin for wasted investments.

A key consideration at the outset is to decide on the engagement model. This is a function of partners’ capabilities and ambitions. In our experience, we have mainly encountered two partner archetypes (Exhibit 5):

• Low or No Managed Services (MS) experience – they mainly fit the resell-only model

• Medium to High MS experience – they are mainly interested in co-delivery and/or leading with their own MS backed by the vendor.

The engagement model will also determine the nature of the investment and its impact on partner financials. Vendors are responsible for making the partnership economically attractive and should build scenarios to explain the revenue and profit sharing between the parties involved.

The Right Skillset

Driving partner sales and technical readiness

Once the strategic alignment and joint Go-to-market planning are complete, the next essential step is to harness the right talent and capabilities for this new endeavor. Look for people with the agility and ability to embrace ambiguity and an accelerated pace of change. Start with the partner sellers and nurture them to be field-ready. Sales enablement is not a one-and-done effort and involves a journey toward building sales champions.

Given the technical nature of Managed Services, vendors should encourage partners to bring together their sales and pre-sales teams for such learning programs. Training, learning checks, role plays, and certification is required to build the seller’s confidence (Exhibit 6).

Additionally, partners require training on the systems, tools, and processes for service orchestration and delivery. They may also have to attain the requisite technical certifications to take their solutions to the market.

The Right Toolset

Empowering customer outreach and activation

Will and skill are not enough to guarantee success; vendors must arm partners with the tools to achieve commercial outcomes (Exhibit 7). Create a playbook that partners can refer to as a blueprint for building and scaling their managed services business. Marketing remains a crucial challenge for partners, requiring vendor-assisted/funded marketing firepower across the customer journey.

Partners also need access to pricing and quoting tools and adequate pre-sales support to configure the right solutions for customers. They will also need case studies, customer references, and TCO calculators to present a credible value proposition to their customers.

Orchestrating this ecosystem presents its own challenges without full hierarchical power or control. BCG Research^[4] states that the most prevalent reason for failure is the lack of a robust governance model in managing the ecosystem. Hence, the final step is to implement a framework for ecosystem governance that provides vendors and partners with a transparent view of progress, key milestones, and room for continuous improvement.

Business leaders must define their North Star metrics to measure success, like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Customer Churn. There are many other indicators, but vendors and partners must agree on a few to help understand the economics and outcomes of their operating model.

Envisioning and implementing new growth levers will be crucial to business longevity. An ecosystem play can turbocharge the go-to-market efforts, but such partnerships can't be built and operated in autopilot mode.

Vendors must be co-pilots in this journey, helping navigate the operational complexities, de-risking the investments, and enabling partners to achieve their full potential in the long run.

[1] New-business building in 2022: Driving growth in volatile time, McKinsey & Co.

[2] Building a business within a business: How to power continual organic growth, McKinsey & Co.

[3] The State of Technology Services, 2023, TSIA

[4] How do you manage a business ecosystem? - BCG

Summary

Achieving commercial excellence through partners requires dedicated and thoughtful engagement with the partner marketing fraternity. Therefore, vendors committed to channel marketing excellence should actively invest in strategic planning with their key growth partners. This needs to be a phased, guided, and assisted engagement spearheaded by the vendors.

This report establishes the criticality of marketing planning with partners and provides an approach for the vendors to embark on this journey.

Partner Marketing 2.0: A Hit Refresh Moment

Recent studies have shown that Channel/Partner Marketing is becoming a top priority for CMOs. However, delivering on this expectation requires a rethink of how vendors engage with their partner marketers.

For the longest time, the focus has been primarily on the timely and effective usage of the Market Development Funds (MDF). This is myopic as it misses the opportunity to drive a long-term strategic engagement and build a trusted community with your ecosystem partners. A third-party study^[1] suggests that 59% of partners don’t always create a comprehensive marketing plan for their business.

A key driver of this short-term thinking is focusing on immediate results rather than using partner marketing as a strategic lever. Partner marketers are overburdened managing multiple suppliers, brands, portfolios, funds, tools, and policies, in addition to their organizational expectations. Instead of being customer experience architects, they operate as a lead-generation engine.

This routine leaves little room for them to understand, organize, and act proactively in the ever-changing B2B buyer landscape and other market forces shaping the marketplace. Vendors willing to play the long game need to rethink and redesign their partner marketing engagement model to leverage the full potential of their partner marketers. However, this doesn’t require a complete overhaul and can be built upon the existing capabilities that the vendor has invested in.

A well-designed planning approach helps future-proof partner marketers

Research^[1] validates that marketing planning is a difference-maker in driving significant growth: 40% greater growth is projected when partners commit to continually creating a marketing plan for their business.

Planning is a bedrock activity that helps vendors and partners envision the experience from the customers’ vantage. The idea is to move strategically, not conveniently, as outlined in Exhibit 1.

• Partner segmentation is key to success. It’s both an art and a science, and it's always prudent to lead with data. Some lead indicators include partners with joint business plans, those eligible for marketing investment, those presenting significant growth opportunities, and those with an existing marketing function.

• Start with business alignment built upon a customer-first mindset. A decade ago, Simon Sinek wrote “Start with Why,” a book that inspires organizations to be purpose-driven. Let this be the north star when partners define their unique differentiation in sync with your mission. This is the critical first step that determines the quality and longevity of the collaboration.

• Leverage “outside-in perspectives” shaping B2B commerce. A combination of social, economic, and technological trends influences how customers behave. Provide the big-picture view of the headwinds and tailwinds impacting the business. Understanding these trends helps partners assess whether the forces are convergent or divergent to their capabilities and develop a SWOT analysis. This will provide a realistic view of alignment between ambition and current capabilities, which will help tightly define the core value proposition.

• Define the marketing play that drives commercial success. Partners must begin by defining their marketing charter and ensuring it is aligned and well understood across their organization. This also needs to be endorsed and supported by their C-suite.

As a next step, vendors should engage with partners to help develop the joint marketing plan and ensure a balance between vendor and partner priorities. The plan should be surgical in terms of goals, timelines, and metrics that will define success.

Lastly, agree on a governance model that ensures visibility into both lead and lag indicators, as well as room for course corrections.

Planning as an outcome, not an output

Implementing a marketing planning engagement with partners is not a one-and-done effort and requires a phased approach led and assisted by the vendors [Exhibit 2]. The objective should align with evolving customer priorities, journeys, and preferences rather than a periodic documentation exercise.

A few critical considerations while embarking on this journey:

• Begin by aligning marketing objectives to business priorities. Misalignment fuels mistrust and is counterproductive to business survival and growth. For marketing to play a critical role, it must be intertwined with the broader commercial function. An excellent place to start is with a joint business plan.

• Create a prioritized list of executable, measurable goals. Keep the plan real and define specific goals that can be tracked and measured. Define success metrics that are aligned with the overall commercial success.

• Nurture organization-wide commitment to the plan. Marketing must play a unifying role within the company to deliver the desired customer experience. This is only possible if the entire C-suite is aware and supportive of the marketing charter and plan.

• Effectively communicate the plan. Channelize resources and garner support by proactively sharing the plan with all relevant stakeholders. This also ensures better orchestration in customer outreach and engagement.

• Keep the plan alive. Static plans are meaningless for operating in a dynamic environment. Hence, revisit the plan regularly to ensure it reflects the market realities and is structured to drive growth.

Together aligned or forever behind

Change is never easy, especially after two years of pandemic-related disruption. Vendors need to support partners with the Right Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset to help future-proof their business. A few essential steps in that direction:

• Conduct a marketing maturity assessment. Evaluate the current state of your partners' capabilities and the maturity of their marketing functions. This will enable you to segment partners and develop an engagement plan accordingly.

• Identify the marketing skills gap. Map their existing skills to the desired future capabilities to identify areas of improvement. This dovetails into skills planning and competency-building efforts.

• Certify partner marketers in marketing planning. Hardwire planning into their marketing operating model by making it a competence. This will build the knowledge and confidence to partake in strategic conversations actively.

• Provide a marketing planning toolkit. For broader adoption, make it easier to embark on the journey. Create a toolkit comprising a guidance document and a planning template to get them started. Seek professional help to coach your partners through the process.

[1] State of Partner Marketing, IPED Consulting