TL;DR
Most partner programs still treat joint business planning like a one-time exercise with built in spreadsheets, forgotten in execution, and disconnected from real outcomes.
The result: 95% of teams rate their process as mediocre or worse, and over half still rely on manual tools that can’t keep pace with the business.
This isn’t a tooling gap, it’s a strategy gap. When plans are static and hard to manage, they don’t drive alignment, accountability, or revenue. They become overhead.
The shift is clear: teams that operationalize planning through automation turn it into a living system that drives engagement, visibility, and growth.
Bottom Line: If your partner plans aren’t actively shaping decisions, they’re already obsolete.
Background to this eBook
The focus of this eBook is on optimizing joint partner business planning through automation.
Channelscaler hosted a webinar in Q4 2024, featuring an expert panel who shared insights into the challenges of partner business planning. The panel explored how adopting the right automated approach can not only streamline partner relationships but also ensure alignment between all parties in achieving their goals and objectives.
The panel featured senior partnering executives:
Jessica Tanoury, Director of Global Partner Programs at Juniper Networks
Richard Carlson, Global Partner Enablement Lead at Broadcom
Sean O’Connell, Chief Product Officer at Channelscaler
Kenneth Fox, CEO at Channelscaler
In this eBook we’ve gathered the live poll responses from webinar attendees and paired them with expert insights from the panel.
Read on to discover how automation can help you to design and manage scalable, agile joint business plans that drive sustainable partnerships and revenue growth—making you, the vendor, easier to do business with.
Meet the Panel
What is Joint Partner Business Planning?
Joint partner business planning is a collaborative process where vendors and their strategic channel partners work together to develop a unified plan that aligns mutual business objectives and go-to-market approaches.
The result is a joint partner business plan that serves as a key component of the partnership go-to-market strategy, clearly outlining the goals, roles, responsibilities, and expectations between vendors and their channel partners.
By collaborating on a shared vision, businesses can leverage their partners’ strengths and capabilities, leading to more successful outcomes, better relationships and an improved bottom line.
Considering how strategic this process is, why did 95% of poll respondents rate their current partner business planning process as a 3 or lower on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “not effective” and 5 is “extremely effective“.
This suggests that most organizations find their joint partner business planning processes to be suboptimal, with only 5% considering them to be effective.
Why Joint Partner Business Plans Matter?
Creating and executing a joint partner business plan brings numerous benefits, including alignment, accountability, and successful collaboration.
Here are some of the top benefits:
- Clear Goals and Objectives: Establishes shared goals between the company and its partners, ensuring alignment in sales, marketing, and customer success efforts.
- Improved Collaboration: Develops better communication and collaboration, leading to stronger relationships and more effective teamwork between the company and its channel partners.
- Increased Sales and Revenue: Creates a strategic roadmap for growth, helping partners to identify new opportunities and markets, leading to higher sales and profitability for both parties.
- Performance Measurement: Establishes key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress, measure success, and adjust strategies as needed to stay on track.
- Risk Mitigation: Anticipates challenges and risks in the partnership, allowing both parties to address them proactively and avoid costly setbacks.
- Long-term Sustainability: Builds a foundation for long-term success by fostering trust, mutual respect, and continued strategic alignment between the company and its partners.
“We see joint business plans as a strategic element of all of our partnerships. They help create clear expectations and a shared vision for growth, ultimately strengthening our partnerships. They drive accountability on both sides and help ensure that our people and joint investments are utilized effectively.
And, most importantly, they give us the ability to measure results and success, and to track our progress in a consistent way across our ecosystem.”Jessica Tanoury
Director of Global Partner Programs at Juniper Networks
What are the Key Challenges with Joint Partner Business Planning?
Respondents identified challenges at each stage of the joint partner business planning process:
1) Partner Business Plan Creation
22% cited it as a time-consuming manual process.
19% found it difficult to collaborate with their partners.
2) Partner Business Plan Management
39% identified tracking progress and accountability as their biggest challenge.
19% highlighted the lack of real-time data and insights as a problem.
Each of these challenges arise from a combination of limited resources and data —problems that automation can effectively address, improving both efficiency and outcomes.
The Fundamental Challenge of Limited Automation
Are you still using spreadsheets and slides to manage your partner business plans? You’re not alone.
Over half (53%) of those polled reported relying on manual methods like spreadsheets for partner planning.
However, this approach comes with significant drawbacks:
- Static and inflexible documents
- Version control issues
- Limited collaboration capabilities
- Lengthy, complex plans
- Time-consuming manual updates
Automating partner business planning resolves these inefficiencies and enables:
- Real-time collaboration
- Dynamic plans that adapt to changing conditions
- Enhanced visibility into progress
- Streamlined processes
- Improved alignment on shared goals
A growing number of companies are starting to automate joint partner plans. This trend is expected to accelerate as more organizations recognize the strategic value of optimizing their partner planning processes.
“Historically we did use spreadsheets, as I think many people do, but it was very time consuming, complex, and heavily manual for us to manage. Our plans relied on human touch. It was very resource-intensive to create historical views or to pull data and reporting from different systems and views.
We needed to move from a human driven plan to a data-driven plan.”
Jessica Tanoury
Director of Global Partner Programs at Juniper Networks
The Hidden Cost of Manual Joint Business Planning: Time-Consuming and Inefficient
Joint partner business planning is a critical process for defining objectives, identifying resources, and determining performance metrics. By collaborating on a shared vision, businesses can leverage their partners’ strengths and capabilities, leading to more successful outcomes.
Unfortunately, the current process is far from optimal.
As highlighted earlier, over 70% of respondents are not leveraging automation for joint business planning.
The impact?
60% report that the process takes 1-2 months
Alarmingly, over a third (35%) say it drags on for more than 3 months
Wouldn’t your partner account managers’ time be better spent on activities that directly drive revenue?
“You cannot expect partners to read a PDF guide… you need something constantly evolving on your portal. Visualization of requirements and progress is how you drive engagement.”
Richard Carlson
Global Partner Enablement Lead
Broadcom
Joint Business Plans Drive Engagement & Commitment
Partners with joint business plans are often more engaged and aligned with their vendor’s goals. While most vendors recognize the value these plans bring, they also acknowledge the effort required from both sides.
As a result, joint business planning is typically reserved as a requirement for strategic or top-tier partnerships.
- Only 13% of those surveyed mandate business plans for their entire partner ecosystem.
- 43% focus on their top-tier or managed partners, ensuring deeper collaboration and greater impact.
A scalable, efficient solution can help vendors extend the benefits of joint business planning to a broader range of partner types and tiers, driving mutual success without overburdening resources.
Living the Plan
Your business is not static, so neither should your joint business plans with partners.
Here are the top 3 reasons why we recommend regularly reviewing and updating your joint partner business plans:
- Adapt to Changes: Regular reviews ensure that the plan remains relevant by adapting to shifts in market conditions, business objectives, customer preferences, opportunities or competitor action.
- Track and Adjust: Ongoing evaluation provides an opportunity to assess progress against goals, identify gaps, and make necessary adjustments to address concerns or challenges early.
- Strengthen the Partnership: Frequent check-ins encourage open communication, transparency, and trust in partner relationships, as well as keeping your business plan front of mind.
Over half of the poll participants say they review and update their business plans at least quarterly which is an absolute minimum for best practice. However, with automated planning, you can monitor and assess progress anytime—it’s like having a real-time QBR at your fingertips!
““What we often hear from Partner Account Managers:
We sit down with our partners to create detailed plans—covering revenue targets, new customer goals, training, and enablement to drive sales.
The first meeting always goes well, with everyone aligned and ready to execute. But then… life happens – we get busy.
By the next quarterly meeting, those plans have been forgotten—buried in a drawer. No one has tracked progress, actions weren’t followed through, and there’s confusion about expectations. Everyone starts with the best intentions, but inevitably, the day-to-day responsibilities take over.””
Kenneth Fox
CEO
Channelscaler
The Power of Partner-Planning Automation
Automation transforms the joint partner business planning process into a strategic advantage by reducing manual work, integrating data into a single source of truth, and providing better visibility and alignment.
Here are some of the key benefits:
- Increased Efficiency: Automation streamlines processes, reducing the time spent on manual tasks such as data gathering, data entry, reporting, and communication. This allows your team to focus on strategic sales activities rather than administration.
- Real-Time Insights: Automated joint business planning can provide real-time data and analytics, enabling you to monitor KPIs continuously and make quicker adjustments to strategies as needed.
- Improved Data Accuracy: Automation minimizes the risk of human error, especially when dealing with data from multiple sources, leading to one source of truth, more reliable insights, and better decision-making.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Automated platforms can facilitate better communication and collaboration between vendor and partner, making it easier to share resources, updates, and feedback.
- Customized Reporting: Automation allows for the creation of tailored reports that can provide insights specific to different partners or regions, enabling more personalized strategies.
Channelscaler: Automated Partner Business Planning
Investing in automated joint partner business planning is not just a tactical move. It is a strategic imperative for long-term success.
Key Features
- Centralized planning platform accessible via partner portal
- Customizable, easy-to-use templates for different partner types, levels, regions and more
- Real-time collaboration tools for updates, notes, and document sharing
- Automated notifications and approval workflows
- Ability to integrate with pre-populated key fields from CRM and other data sources (PRMs, LMS, CRMs)
- Supports data integration from existing manual plans and other systems
- Automated tracking and real-time reporting on performance & progress
“Automation cuts down on a lot of manual effort that we’re putting into the front-end to create those baseline plans. It creates a strategic advantage with both our partners and our account teams because it’s delivering time savings.
Our partners can work in real time with our account teams to more effectively share plans, and then work on the plans together, rather than sending everything back and forth.
It’s all on the platform, integrated into one pane of glass, with reporting in that same view. No more jumping between different dashboards – it’s truly end-to-end.”
Jessica Tanoury
Director of Global Partner Programs
Juniper Networks
Key Takeaways
“Standardize and customize is how we should approach things. We all have unique ecosystems, unique channel partners. So, you have to be able to have those standardized metrics so that you can measure your success, but you need to allow for customization to be able to support each and every partner.”
Jessica Tanoury
Director of Global
Partner Programs
Juniper Networks
“It is a living, breathing document. It’s always changing, because guess what? Business is always changing. The world is always changing. It’s never a case of what you said in January is the same in December. There’ll be a million changes along the way that have to be managed.”
Richard Carlson
Global Partner Enablement Lead
Broadcom
“Ease of doing business is absolutely fundamental. Human nature being what it is, humans tend to gravitate to the easiest route. So if you can make it as easy as possible for people to engage, to know what they are focused on and what they are working towards, then you are going to increase that partner mindshare.That’s where you try and build that competitive advantage.”
Seán O’Connell
Chief Product Officer
Channelscaler
