joint-gtm-planning

Joint GTM Planning

Plan one joint go-to-market initiative with one specific partner. The partner is already chosen - ranking candidates belongs to mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@alliance-prioritization. What gets planned here is a single motion:

• The customer-facing "better together" story.
• The campaign shape.
• Who does what, with which budget.
• The launch sequence both sides commit to.
• The lead-sharing and attribution agreement.
• The debrief that decides whether to repeat.

The output is a joint GTM plan both companies can sign - a decision artifact, not campaign assets. Ad copy, email bodies, webinar scripts, and landing pages are tactical work downstream of this plan. Note the boundary with the ecosystem sibling: its joint-value-proposition workshop filters whether a partner category can articulate joint value at all; this skill drafts the actual customer-facing claim for one named partner and one initiative.

Interview

Ask before proposing anything. One question per message; offer multiple-choice options when possible. Skip anything the user already answered. If your harness has persistent memory, check it first for a previously approved plan with this partner and confirm what changed instead of re-interviewing.

• Which partner, and what state is the relationship in: newly signed, signed but dormant, active with prior campaigns, or a strategic alliance with executive ties?
• What is the initiative, and what business objective drives it: pipeline generation, an integration or product launch, entering a new segment or market, brand association, a shared event?
• Who is the target audience, and what account or audience overlap is verified - mapped overlap data, customer-interview evidence, or assumption?
• What can the two companies credibly claim together that neither can alone? A draft joint value proposition, or a blank page?
• What assets does each side already have: integration, content, customer stories, audience channels, event presence, house lists?
• What budget does each side commit, and are market-development or co-op funds available - with what claim rules and deadlines?
• What is each side's effort ceiling: hours available, headcount assigned, how much approval capital the owner can spend, and how reversible the commitment must stay? Money is not the constraint that picks the campaign shape - two-company coordination is.
• What is the timeline, is any date fixed (an event, a product release, a quarter close), and by what date must results actually land? A launch date and a results date are different constraints.
• Is the goal a one-off win this quarter, or a compounding asset that keeps earning after launch? Never let this stay implicit - it flips the campaign-shape ranking outright.
• Who is the named owner on each side, and who is the executive sponsor on each side? Four names.
• What lead-sharing and data-protection constraints apply: regions covered, consent regime, each side's CRM, any existing data-sharing agreement?
• What does success mean to each side separately? Never accept one merged "shared goal" - asymmetry hidden now becomes the post-mortem later.

Workflow

Hold one discipline throughout: at every real fork - campaign shape, sequencing pattern, lead-split rule, budget structure - present 2-3 candidate approaches with trade-offs and an explicit recommendation, then wait for the user's call. Never let an assumption harden into the plan unstated.

1. Run the Interview. If you can browse the web, read both companies' sites, the partner's public partner page, and any existing joint listing - audit reality before planning on it.
2. Gate on readiness before planning anything. Decline, with reasons, when a disqualifier holds:

• No named owner or no executive sponsor on either side.
• The partner is unresponsive or uncommitted.
• No joint value articulable beyond putting two logos on one asset.
• The two sides' objectives don't intersect at all - one wants leads, the other only brand reach, a known co-marketing failure pattern.
• One side has no budget or capacity.
• A live co-sell policy dispute is burning - hand that to mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-channel-conflict first.

When the gate fails, name the missing piece and stop - a plan cannot fix an unstaffed partnership.

1. Draft the joint value proposition for this initiative: the customer-facing claim, who it serves, and why it takes both companies. Apply the "neither alone" test - if either company could credibly ship the initiative solo, it is a solo campaign wearing a partner logo; reshape or kill it.
2. Establish mutual value and audience overlap:

• State each side's objective separately, with a number and a date.
• Consume verified overlap output from the ecosystem sibling when it exists; otherwise approximate from customer evidence, never from assumption.
• Define the target segment and its explicit exclusions - existing customers of both sides, or of just one?

1. Choose the campaign shape - the biggest fork. Read references/campaign-formats-and-sequencing.md first: it ranks the B2B and B2C format menus by efficiency - value bought per unit of two-company coordination - and the default is the joint webinar in B2B, the creator collaboration in B2C. Shortlist 2-3 formats from the top of that order, after deleting the ones the Interview answers rule out and re-ranking against what you know about this pair of companies. Present them with effort, value, and compliance trade-offs and an explicit recommendation. Say out loud which answer moved which format:

• A hard results date deletes the quarter-long formats.
• A compounding-asset mandate promotes the research report and the better-together page.
• A low effort ceiling collapses the menu to the one-hour formats.

1. Split work, assets, and budget:

• Allocate creation by each side's strength.
• Record each side's spend as its own line.
• Record market-development or co-op fund terms verbatim - eligible activities, proof-of-execution required, claim deadline.

Unclaimed funds are a top failure mode.

1. Sequence the launch through six phases: agree terms, build assets, pre-launch, simultaneous launch on one agreed date, follow-up, debrief. Budget roughly double a single-company timeline - the surplus is the other organization's approval and feedback cycles, and it is the norm, not a contingency. Anchor backwards from any fixed date. Same reference.
2. Design the lead-sharing and attribution agreement: the consent decision at the point of collection, plus the mechanics that follow from it.

• Legal basis.
• Both companies named.
• Consent kept separable rather than bundled.
• Withdrawal route.
• Who owns the form - the control point (see the data-protection section below).
• Transfer mechanism and timing.
• A jointly agreed qualified-lead definition.
• Deduplication rule.
• Per-party tracking links.
• The sourced-vs-influenced rule for this initiative.

Decide those parameters here and record them; drafting the literal form copy is per-asset execution and hands downstream with the rest of the asset work. If a program-wide attribution policy exists from the co-selling sibling, consume it as a constraint - never redesign it here. See references/lead-sharing-and-attribution.md.

1. Assemble the plan (next section) and present it section by section, validating each with the user before drafting the next. Revise on pushback. Require explicit approval of the whole document before finalizing - and its real-world counterpart: both companies' owners sign it before any asset work starts.
2. Score the approved draft against the pass checklist. State which checks fail and iterate until every one passes.
3. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the approved plan's key decisions - partner, initiative, campaign shape, launch date, lead-sharing rule, per-side goals - so later runs (mid-flight check-ins, the debrief, the next initiative with this partner) start from them.
4. Hand off what this skill does not do - choosing partners, deal-registration policy, program tiers, relationship economics, ongoing scorecards, enablement curricula - to the siblings in Reference.

The Joint GTM Plan

Deliver every engagement as this artifact - one page both companies can sign:

JOINT GTM PLAN - <company> x <partner>: <initiative>, <date>
Objectives      : each side's goal separately, each with a number and a date
Joint value prop: the customer-facing claim + why it takes both companies
Audience        : target segment, overlap evidence, explicit exclusions
Campaign shape  : format chosen, where it sat in the efficiency order, what moved it there,
                  alternatives rejected and why
Assets & split  : who creates and who approves each asset; existing assets reused
Budget & funding: each side's spend as its own line; MDF/co-op terms verbatim
Sequencing      : phase dates, the one agreed launch date, approval buffer shown
Leads & tracking: consent basis + parameters, transfer mechanism + timing, qualified-lead
                  definition, dedup rule, per-party links, sourced/influenced rule
Owners          : named owner + executive sponsor on each side - four names
Measurement     : KPIs per side, reporting cadence, scheduled debrief date

Every line carries a reason - "launch on the 14th because the partner's conference opens the 15th" is reviewable; a bare date is not.

Pass checklist - the plan is not done until every check passes; state the failing checks and the gap each time:

• Each side's success criterion is stated separately, with a number. A single merged goal fails.
• The joint value proposition passes the "neither alone" test.
• Four named people: an owner and an executive sponsor on each side. A team name is not an owner.
• One launch date, agreed by both sides, with the approval buffer visible in the phase dates.
• The leads line names the consent basis and its parameters at collection, the transfer mechanism, and the hand-off timing - parameters, not drafted form copy.
• Every tracked link attributes to a specific party; no shared untagged link exists.
• Any MDF/co-op money carries its proof-of-execution requirement and claim deadline.
• The debrief is a scheduled date, set before launch - not "afterwards".
• Every benchmark quoted anywhere in the plan carries a provenance flag.

Established practice vs vendor vocabulary vs no standard

Grade what you cite honestly - this field mixes real practice with vendor marketing:

• Established, safe to present prescriptively:
• Co-marketing itself (academic lineage to Koichi Shimizu, 1981).
• The signed co-marketing agreement, covering topic, timeline, per-side goals, asset ownership, lead-sharing, promotion, and reporting.
• MDF/co-op funding with proof-of-performance (verification mechanics dating to 1930s co-op advertising).
• Separate tracking links per party.
• Consent language at the form level.
• Executive sponsorship.
• The post-campaign debrief.

General frameworks borrowed in - RACI for ownership, OKRs for objectives, phase-gate for the approval gate - are real but not partner-marketing inventions; use them lightly, never force-fit.

• Vendor-coined vocabulary: "nearbound" and "ecosystem-led growth" originate with one vendor (Crossbeam) and its acquired media brands; account mapping as a named discipline was popularized by the same vendor. Usable as shared vocabulary, never as doctrine.

• No standard exists:
• There is no canonical joint business plan or joint GTM plan template - the skeleton above is assembled practice, so validate it section by section rather than treating it as an industry form.
• Launch-tier criteria (Tier 1/2/3), joint business review agendas, MDF thresholds, and cross-company qualified-lead definitions are all program-specific - make the user decide them explicitly.
• The circulating "60-70% of alliances fail" figure is untraceable folklore. Never quote a single alliance failure rate as settled fact: published estimates span 20-80% depending on how failure is defined, so present the spread with its provenance - mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@alliance-prioritization owns this number's treatment.

B2B and B2C

The planning discipline is identical on both sides:

• Goals stated separately per side.
• A signed agreement before asset work.
• Brand-fit screening (association itself is the risk).
• One agreed launch date.
• Named owners.
• A debrief.

What genuinely changes:

Lead sharing and data protection

Sharing captured leads between two companies is regulated processing of personal data in most jurisdictions - the EU's regime (GDPR) is the strictest template, but the logic travels. Every transfer needs a legal basis, and a lead collected for one stated purpose cannot silently serve another company's follow-up.

The control point is the consent wording at the moment of collection. The form must:

• Name both companies.
• State the purpose.
• Keep each company's consent separable rather than bundled.
• Make withdrawal easy.

When both companies jointly decide what data is collected and why - a co-hosted webinar is the classic case - many regimes treat them as joint controllers: the responsibility split must be documented and disclosed, and a lead can exercise rights against either company regardless of the internal split.

Full mechanics and the agreement contents: references/lead-sharing-and-attribution.md.

KPIs

Measure this initiative only - the partner's ongoing scorecard belongs to mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-performance.

• Track partner-sourced and partner-influenced separately for this initiative; collapsing them hides whether the motion generated demand or decorated it.
• Score each side against its own separately stated goal - a campaign can succeed for one company and fail for the other, and the plan must be able to say so.
• Core set: leads per party (via per-party links), qualified-lead conversion against the jointly agreed definition, pipeline and revenue attributed, audience growth per side, asset engagement. Qualitative debrief: was collaboration smooth, did the content need both companies, would either side repeat.
• Compute return as incremental profit attributable to the initiative divided by each side's own spend - each side computes its own; a blended number hides asymmetric outcomes.
• Published benchmark numbers in partner marketing are overwhelmingly vendor-self-reported (platforms selling partnership software, surveying their own customers). Quote any such number only with that flag attached; prefer the user's own historical campaign data as the baseline.

Failure modes

Invocation Examples

• "Plan the joint GTM motion for our integration launch with a named data-platform partner - both sides have budget, launch is tied to their user conference."
• "We ran a joint webinar with a partner and got nothing. Plan the next initiative differently, and tell me what the debrief should have asked."
• "Draft the lead-sharing and attribution agreement for a co-marketing campaign covering EU and US audiences."

Reference

• references/campaign-formats-and-sequencing.md - the B2B and B2C format menus ranked by efficiency (value per unit of two-company coordination), with the effort, value and compliance axes split out, the six-phase sequencing skeleton, fixed-date anchoring, MDF/co-op mechanics.
• references/lead-sharing-and-attribution.md - the lead-sharing agreement contents, data-protection mechanics (legal basis, separable consent, joint controllers), tracking-link conventions, qualified-lead alignment, benchmark provenance flags.
• references/plan-examples.md - one worked joint GTM plan and one annotated negative example (the logo-swap plan).

Sibling skills (same collection):

• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@alliance-prioritization - upstream: choosing which partner to invest in. This skill starts after that decision.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@co-selling-strategy - the program-wide deal registration and attribution policy this plan operates under as a constraint.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-ecosystem - the ecosystem map and account-overlap landscape this plan consumes as targeting input.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-performance - ongoing partner scorecards and business-review cadence beyond this initiative's own measurement.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-channel-conflict - a live dispute between direct and partner sellers over an account; resolve it before planning a joint motion.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-marketplace-strategy - marketplace listing strategy, if the initiative includes a marketplace motion.