Business Planning Workshop

What is it?

This is the first stage of our process for a partner that is keen to accelerate growth in a particular product or solution area, or is looking to create a robust, well thought through and risk-reduced business plan, and then work with us to implement it.

We sit down with the heads of the business and go through all areas of the organisation: business goals and ambitions, technical capability and capacity' operational infrastructure, marketing strategy and communications and, of course, the resulting sales function and performance.

Identifying your highest value clients:

We can give you an independent view of how to identify who your most profitable clients are, where you may have a market opportunity or competitive advantage and how you could be leveraging more from your Microsoft partnership.

Our objective is to properly understand your business in detail, so that we can come back to you with recommendations and highlight priority areas that we think will make a significant difference to you.
The Business Planning process is based on all of our work delivering over 500 sales and marketing projects with Microsoft partners over the last 5 years – we have learnt so much about what makes a successful partnership with Microsoft, how you can align your business to take full advantage of all the opportunities available to you, and what to avoid.

The results we bring back to you don’t just include ideas on how we can help you to accelerate growth, but also what you could be doing internally and what you could expect to gain. Often, we find that a few small changes can leap partners ahead – that’s what we seek to do. Wow people right from the first engagement, so that you can see how much is possible and how achievable it is.

Our process and report will enable you to build a realistic and focused Business Maturity Plan designed to help you to move your business forward with confidence and success.

How do we do it?

We get together with you at our offices and spend one day going through a very structured agenda. We provide you with a detailed agenda in advance of the session so that you can come prepared for the discussion we will have together.

The session is run by a Senior Business Consultant from ResourceiT plus other people such as a Marketing Strategy Consultant, Marketing Communications Manager, Project Manager or Telemarketing expert, basically anyone from our business that we think will be able to contribute and are a good match for what the partner wants to achieve.

The workshop session is followed up with a 2 hour session, on your site this time, where we present back our findings to you using an engaging PowerPoint presentation. We will go through our recommendations and explain to you how we have reached the conclusions we have, and leave you with a comprehensive report to digest and consider.

It is very rare that a partner going through this stage does not go on to work with us to implement specific suggestions we have made.

Benefits to you - our client

• Evaluation, direction and assessment of your business
• Independent view of your opportunity and value
• Strategic advice, based on our experience and knowledge of actions taken by other successful Microsoft partners
• Interactive day with your Senior team so everyone is involved in the decisions you take and why you are taking them – bringing your team together

Tangible Outputs

• Valuable and comprehensive report and advice on how to create a maturity plan that you can take forward yourself or work with us to implement, with highlighted priorities and recommended success metrics and milestones
• Information and ideas for ways in which you can improve results from your sales and marketing function, such as shorter sales cycles, increased conversion ratios and more effective pre-sales
• Total clarity on why and how to Maximise your relationship with Microsoft [link to book on Amazon] to achieve the incremental benefits available to you
• Recommendations for other complementary partnership opportunities you could explore – and in some cases direct introductions

Why us?

• Our focus on results – nothing else matters
• We are domain experts providing the knowledge and support you need when you need it
• Our contacts and network both with Microsoft and within the partner channel
• Our flexible engagement model that suits your business and your budget – some companies spend £500 a month with us, others £10,000
• Our model works – we have proved it 100’s of times – we are not a bunch of luvvies, we are focused, dedicated, successful and the best in the business

Next Steps

Once we have presented back the report and recommendations you can agree what you can do yourself, and what you need help with.

We’ll give you a shopping list of potential suggestions for actions you can take and services we can provide you with to support your Sales, Marketing and Microsoft Alliance focus, and prioritise them for you.

We go through that together – you with your red pen and us with the notepad, and you decide what’s realistic for you and what kind of budget works for you. We’ll give you an ROI number to aim for – so you can clearly see what the investment will deliver for your business.

We then create a 12 month engagement plan together and agree success metrics and reporting and start our journey together – within 12 months you’ll be further ahead than you ever imagined you could be. See our client success stories for what this has meant to them.