Creating A Channel Marketing Plan

B2B leaders should approach the annual marketing planning process with the same type of focus that an expert player brings to a strategic game — determining actions based on defined goals while considering the goals and actions of other players. Channel marketers must develop annual plans by focusing on their function’s goals while being aware of the goals and actions of other functions and organizations. One of the challenges that all marketing organizations have in common is the need to translate business objectives into concise goals and actions. Although the annual planning process may appear complex, it can be broken down into a finite number of elements, and a template can be used to facilitate plan creation and communication (see Channel Marketing Plans: Applying The Plan-On-A-Page Approach). In this report, we describe the annual channel marketing planning process of a hypothetical organization to illustrate how to execute the Forrester Marketing-Plan-On-A-Page Template in a channel marketing planning environment.