Most partner go-to-market plans start in the wrong place.
They start with the solution. Somebody's built a nice packaged offering - a managed security service, a Copilot readiness assessment, a vertical-specific Business Central build - and now the job is described as "we need to market it".
So a launch date gets picked, a landing page gets written, a LinkedIn post goes out, and three months later it's produced two enquiries and a lot of quiet disappointment.
The solution wasn't the problem. The plan was, because it was really just a list of activities with a date on it.
Here's how I'd actually build one. Seven steps, in this order, and the order matters.
Step 1: Decide what winning looks like - in numbers
Before anything else, write down what this solution has to deliver and by when.
Ten customers in twelve months. £250k of new recurring revenue. Three reference customers in one named sector by the end of the fiscal year.
Then do the maths backwards. If you need ten customers and you close one in four qualified conversations, you need forty conversations. If a third of your first meetings become qualified, that's a hundred and twenty first meetings. Suddenly the plan has a shape, and you can see immediately whether "a LinkedIn post and a webinar" is going to get anywhere near it.
Most launches fail this test on day one and nobody notices until month six.
Get out of this step with: a revenue or customer target, a rough funnel calculation, and a deadline.
Step 2: Pin down exactly who it's for
Not "mid-market". Not "organisations looking to modernise".
Who specifically. What size, what sector, what's happening in their business right now that makes this urgent, what they've probably already tried, and who else is in the room when they decide.
That last one catches people out. On a typical Microsoft solution sale you've got a technical champion who wants it, an IT lead who's worried about the migration, and a finance director who's never heard of you and mainly wants to know what it costs and what happens if it goes wrong. Three different people needing three different things. That's the work behind audience-led messaging.
If you can only speak to the champion, deals will stall late - and late-stage stalls are the most expensive kind.
Get out of this step with: one primary target profile, written down, and a list of the two or three other people who influence the decision.
Step 3: Work out why anyone would buy it now
Plenty of good solutions sell nothing because the honest answer to "why now" is "no reason at all".
So find the trigger. What has to happen in a customer's world for this to move from a nice idea to a live requirement?
An end-of-support date. A failed audit. A renewal coming up. A new compliance requirement. A merger. Somebody senior asking a question nobody can answer.
Then build the plan around finding people at that moment, rather than broadcasting to everyone and hoping.
If you genuinely can't identify a trigger, that's worth knowing before you spend the budget. It usually means you've got a sensible solution to a problem nobody's currently prioritising.
Step 4: Write the proposition, and make it one a competitor couldn't copy
Now - and only now - write what you're going to say.
Three things it needs to do. Name the problem in the customer's own words. Say what you do about it plainly. Give a reason to believe you.
That third one is where most partner propositions collapse. "Our certified experts deliver best practice" is not a reason to believe anything. A named customer, a number, a specific method, a guarantee, a piece of IP - those are. It's exactly what proper value proposition development is for.
And run the honest test on it: could three of your competitors put their logo on this and leave it unchanged? If yes, go again. You've written a category description, not a proposition.
Keep it short enough that a Microsoft seller could repeat it accurately in a customer meeting they didn't invite you to. If it takes a slide to explain, it won't travel.
Step 5: Decide how it gets to market - all four routes
There are more routes than most partners use, and the good plans use several at once.
Direct to your own base
Almost always the fastest revenue in the plan, and almost always underused. Who among your existing customers has the trigger from step three right now? Start there - they already trust you, and you'll get your first reference customer months earlier.
Direct to new prospects
Content, campaigns, outbound, events. Slowest to produce, and the one everyone starts with.
Through Microsoft
Co-sell, your account team, the marketplace, funded campaign support. This deserves real effort and gets almost none. Microsoft's sellers and account teams will happily bring in a partner with a sharp, credible, easy-to-explain solution - but they have to know it exists and trust it won't embarrass them. That's most of what marketing into Microsoft covers.
Through other partners
Partner-to-partner is genuinely underrated. Somebody selling a complementary service into your exact target customer is a better lead source than most paid channels, and it costs you a conversation.
Get out of this step with: a primary route and a secondary one. Not all four at once, unless you've got the team to do all four properly.
Step 6: Build the assets the journey actually needs
Now you can decide what to make - and it's usually fewer things than people expect.
Work through the buyer's journey and ask what's needed at each point: something that helps someone recognise the problem before they're shopping; something that helps them compare their options honestly; something that proves you can do it, meaning a real case study with real numbers; and something your champion can use to get internal sign-off.
That last one gets skipped almost universally, and it's often the highest-return thing on the list. A one-page business case, an indicative cost model, an answer to "what happens if we do nothing" - give your champion the tools to sell it internally when you're not in the room.
Also build the internal stuff. Your own sales team needs a one-pager, a qualification checklist and clear pricing before launch day, not two weeks after it.
Step 7: Plan the funding and the first ninety days
Check what Microsoft funding is available to you this fiscal year, what the deadlines are, and whether it fits this launch. Plenty of partners either leave it unclaimed or spend it on something generic because the deadline's looming - and that second one produces activity that looks like a strategy. The Microsoft Co-op Funds Hub walks through what qualifies.
Then map ninety days rather than twelve months. A year-long launch plan is fiction; nobody survives contact with the first month.
Pilot with your own base. Get one customer live. Turn them into a proper case study with real numbers. Then open up the wider campaign, with proof in hand rather than promises.
The three ways these plans usually die
Nobody owns it
A GTM plan with three part-owners has no owner. One name, with time genuinely protected for it.
Sales weren't in the room
If the first they hear of it is at launch, they won't sell it. Bring them into step two.
It gets judged too early
B2B tech buying cycles are long. Set the review point at ninety days, agree in advance what you'd expect to see by then, and don't panic in week three - but do actually hold the review, and be willing to kill it if the answer's clear.
The short version
Number first. Then the person. Then the trigger. Then the message. Then the route. Then the assets. Then the money and the first ninety days.
Do it in that order and you'll build a plan that can be wrong in useful ways - one where you can see which assumption broke and fix it.
Start with the solution and a launch date, and all you'll ever know is that it didn't really work.
Building one of these at the moment and want a second opinion before you commit budget to it? Fifteen minutes, no obligation, no sales pitch.
Nathan, Founder & CEO, Resultful