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.