Plan the multi-year partnership

Use this when a strategic partner needs more than an annual plan. Start from the partner, the current joint plan and its review grades, the executive sponsors on both sides, capability notes, and the horizon goal.

Multi-year plans are earned by actively engaged partners. Everyone else gets the annual plan, and you say so plainly.

Draft the skeleton in four lanes

Build, Develop, Market, Sell — across one, three, and five-year horizons, on the standard plan shape: goals, dated commitments, milestones, metrics, governance, sponsors.

Year one is dated commitments. Years three and five are directional, each with the gate that unlocks it. Every lane names an owner on each side.

Put every assumption at the top, marked as an assumption.

Run the capability assessment

Score the partner 1 to 5 on Sell, Implement, Market, and Support, with one line of evidence per score. Every gap below 3 becomes a dated build item with an owner — never a wish. A score with no evidence stays UNKNOWN.

Map sponsors and governance

One sponsor per side. An operating committee plus a tiered review rhythm — strategic partners quarterly, growth partners semi-annually — under an annual plan refresh. Decision rights: who rules what. The escalation path with its SLA.

A sponsor who is only a title gets a sponsor-ask draft, not a seat on the committee.

Set the milestones and the metrics

Dated roadmap milestones, and at most five metrics. Each metric carries a number, a band, dual owners, and a source. At least one is revenue or pipeline, tagged sourced or influenced.

Report attainment as year-to-date actual against plan, with the year-on-year change alongside.

What you hand back

The multi-year plan under three pages, the capability scorecard, the sponsor map, and the dated milestones with their metrics.

Fallbacks

No joint plan on file means drafting year one from the standard joint-plan shape and marking it INFERENCE. No sponsor means the sponsor ask comes before the governance document.

No plan, scorecard, sponsor map, or milestone set goes to the partner without your explicit yes.