• Customer Success
  • Knowledge Base
  • Product Updates
  • What Is PXM?
  • PXM for Brands

Lead the digital shelf with Product Experience Management (PXM).

  • PXM for Retailers

Source supplier product content efficiently and at scale with PXM.

  • What Is the Digital Shelf?

Learn about the digital shelf, including strategies for winning sales.

Build Winning Shopping Experiences

Learn how to engage and convert more shoppers with these winning tips.

Centralize all your product content, no matter where it lives.

Connect across the digital shelf to deliver engaging product experiences.

Automate manual processes to improve efficiency and accuracy.

For Retailers

Accelerate your retail suppliers and product data onboarding.

Ensure up-to-date product data is always available to your customers.

Gain the freedom to scale your business with automation.

  • PXM Product Experience Management

Manage all product content in one central system of record.

Easily syndicate product content to every consumer touch point.

  • Enhanced Content

Enrich product pages with below-the-fold content and rich media.

  • Catalog Sites

Share secure, on-brand, and always up-to-date digital product catalogs.

Enhance collaboration with Salsify’s automated workflow engine.

Activation Insights

Continuously optimize your organization’s product content syndication.

  • GDSN Data Pool

Synchronize standard supply chain, marketing, and ecommerce attributes globally.

  • PXM Platform, Integrations, and APIs

Integrate the PXM platform with the rest of your enterprise systems architecture.

SXM Supplier Experience Management

  • Supplier Onboarding

Accelerate supplier onboarding while ensuring your schema requirements are met.

  • Product Listing

Sell products faster with Product Listing.

  • Content Enrichment

Increase online conversions with Content Enrichment.

Save time and increase operational efficiency with retail automation.

  • SXM Platform, Integrations, and APIs

Integrate the SXM platform with the rest of your enterprise systems architecture.

PXM Network

Activation Network

Automate how you exchange product content data to the digital shelf.

  • Enhanced Content Network

Turn product pages into product experiences with Enhanced Content.

Ecommerce Platform Integrations

Create winning product experiences on owned sites with powerful ecommerce software.

  • Open Catalog

Connect to the digital shelf faster with an open, standardized, and free product catalog.

  • Solution Partners
  • Find a Solution Partner

Learn more about Salsify solution partners.

  • Become a Solution Partner

Learn how to become a Salsify solution partner.

  • Technology Partners
  • Find a Technology Partner

Learn more about Salsify technology partners.

  • Become a Technology Partner

Learn how to become a Salsify technology partner.

  • Resource Library

Explore our ecommerce resources to get everything you need to win on the digital shelf.

Read our blog to get actionable insights for navigating changing markets and industry demands.

Watch our on-demand ecommerce webinars to gain expert advice and tips from our community of industry leaders.

  • Engineering Blog

Explore our engineering blog to get developer resources, insights, and tips.

Register for our upcoming in-person and virtual events to connect with other industry insiders.

Investigate our knowledge base to build your Salsify skills and understanding.

Explore the latest news and updates for Salsify products.

Examine our comprehensive API and webhook guides to start working with Salsify quickly.

Salsify 2024 Consumer Research Report

2024 Consumer Research: The Modern Buying Journey

Download Salsify's report to get insights into the latest trends and consumer behaviors.

REQUEST DEMO

  • Syndication
  • Automation and AI
  • Digital Shelf Analytics
  • Grocery Accelerator
  • PXM App Center
  • Syndication Network
  • Commerce Platform Integrations

Ecommerce Leaders Share the Essential Steps for a Successful Joint Business Plan

Ecommerce Leaders Share the Essential Steps for a Successful Joint Business Plan

It’s a good news/not-so-great news situation for many ecommerce brands and retailers.

The good news? Ecommerce sales are gaining ground. According to Forbes , digital sales are on track for 8.8% growth in 2024.

The not-so-great news? A recent Gartner survey found that marketing budgets are trending downward, with CMOs reporting a 15% reduction on average.

Add in the seasonal nature of many ecommerce sales efforts , and this creates a challenge for both brands and retailers: How do they reach more potential customers with fewer resources?

Joint business plans (JBPs) offer a solution. Here’s what companies need to know about JBP basics and its benefits, what steps and best practices can help build better plans, and what industry experts say about keeping joint plans on track.

What Is a Joint Business Plan?

A joint business plan is a collaborative strategy developed by brands and retailers that defines short- and long-term goals to improve marketing and sales efforts.

Todd Hassenfelt, senior director of global digital commerce, strategy, and execution for Colgate-Palmolive, defines joint business plans as "collaboration between brands and retailers to set short-term and long-term expectations aiming for mutual ROI [return on investment], category growth for retailers, and volume and share growth for brands.”

It’s worth noting that there’s no one-size-fits-all for joint business plans. Larger organizations may have the resource and personnel bandwidth to create in-depth documents that cover a host of potential outcomes in detail, while smaller companies may opt for what’s often known as “JBP lite.”

A scaled-down version of joint business planning, the lite approach leverages informal conversations and identifies one or two specific goals for companies to meet. This approach reduces complexity without impacting the benefits of the business plan. 

What Are the Benefits of a Joint Business Plan?

There are several benefits of building a joint business plan, including:

Mutually Defined Goals

Brands and retailers may inadvertently work at cross-purposes for their ecommerce marketing and sales strategies . For example, if retailers heavily market a feature that won’t appear in the next product version, they could inadvertently hurt sales.

By creating a joint plan, brands and retailers can create and develop goals that benefit both businesses simultaneously.

Improved ROI

Working together on business plans also clears the way for a greater return on investment. Consider a brand just getting ready to release its newest product version. By providing retailers with details on this new release before it goes live, sales and marketing teams can create campaigns to boost consumer interest and drive strong initial sales.

Reduced Costs

Shared responsibility for success also means shared spending. For example, ecommerce marketing teams from brands and retailers can work in tandem to create cross-functional campaigns that are less costly for both companies but deliver the same results.

What Steps Should Brands and Retailers Take to Create a Joint Business Plan?

The best JBPs don’t just happen — instead, they’re the result of hard work from both brands and retailers. This hard work begins when staff from both businesses meet for the first time. Here are five steps to help run successful meetings.

Step 1: Start With the State of the Brand

Brands should set the stage with details about current market conditions; category wins and challenges; and growth opportunity predictions. It’s also worth providing an overview of brand operations both individually and with the retailer.

Step 2: Speak to the State of the Shopper

Retailers are up next. Their role at this stage of joint business planning is to provide details about current performance relative to other retailers, along with information about shopper demographics and preferences.

Step 3: Decide on Joint Objectives

With common ground established, retailers and brands need to define and decide on joint objectives. This could include improving audience personalization, identifying and using the ideal advertising mediums, or creating more effective ways to track and measure sales success.

Step 4: Explore Emerging Trends

Emerging trends are next. What’s happening in the market right now? What’s on the horizon? And how do current and evolving trends impact sales volumes, product pricing, and new ad campaigns?

Step 5: Specify Metrics

Finally, it’s critical to specify key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure sales performance.

Common KPIs include:

  • Website traffic
  • Cost per click
  • Share of category
  • Sales volume
  • Ecommerce basket size

What Best Practices Help Keep Joint Business Plans on Track?

Several best practices can help keep plans on track and reduce the risk of costly mistakes.

First, keep goals SMART: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This helps reduce the risk of “scope creep” (i.e., a project’s scope grows uncontrollably), which often happens when businesses brainstorm great ideas. By using the SMART framework, companies can ensure goals remain focused.

Next, be prepared to act quickly. Retail trends emerge and change quickly, making agility a critical component of customer engagement and sales success.

Finally, make omnichannel a priority. Businesses need to meet consumers at their touch points of choice, not where they’d like them to be. By creating and maintaining omnichannel experiences, it’s possible to enhance customer engagement and keep buyers coming back.

“The goal is to get to less specialization and more of a well-rounded omnichannel expertise because both sides need digital and in-store to work together,” says Jenn Smith, director of omnichannel national retail sales at Bacardi.

The Inside Scoop: Tips From the Experts

While no two JBP’s are the same, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Here are four tips from industry experts that can help companies streamline the plan-building process.

Listen, Listen — And Then Listen Some More

According to Santiago Lopez Mora, general manager of ecommerce and digital marketing for Just Play Products, JBPs are about “making sure we are all thinking about the business in the same way and getting [the] closest we can to alignment while addressing major challenges.”

Accomplishing these goals is only possible if brands and retailers are willing to listen as much as they talk. The more they understand about each other and the challenges they face, the better.

Share and Share Alike

Frank Mulcahy, head of sales for Chewy Advertising, sees joint business plans as “a multifaceted collaboration with your vendor to negotiate a multitude of items for the year of which advertising is but one of them.”

The main word here is “collaboration.” Joint business planning isn’t about brands laying out requirements for retailers, or retailers asking brands to change their approach — it’s about sharing data on what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to change.

Be Specific

“We define joint business planning as working with retailers that are our major players in terms of sales volume, and if we achieve ‘X,’ we will invest ‘X’ percent toward marketing,” says Nia Mack Rodney, senior omnichannel manager at KIND.

These X’s are critical for transparency — by committing to specific actions or tied to specific spending, joint business plans are better prepared to meet the challenge of changing markets.

Identify What’s at Stake — And Who Has a Stake

For joint business plans to work, companies need to know what’s at stake and who has a stake in making it happen.

Consider The Home Depot, which created a more collaborative JBP process by getting everyone involved in the effort together in one room and asking them what a “good” process looked like. Companies can better meet the needs of disparate stakeholder groups by taking a multi-departmental, multi-perspective approach to joint business planning.

Joint Business Planning: Better Together

With the right approach, joint business plans can improve outcomes for both brands and retailers.

Put simply, while the plan is important, people are the priority. Good plans are built on transparent data exchange and clear goal setting — great plans are created when cross-company teams work in tandem toward collaborative sales and marketing outcomes.

Joint Business Planning Between Retailers and Brands

Download the new report from the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) and Microsoft Advertising that breaks down the essentials of joint business planning, including additional tips from ecommerce leaders.

Written by: Doug Bonderud

Doug Bonderud (he/him) is an award-winning writer with expertise in ecommerce, customer experience, and the human condition. His ability to create readable, relatable articles is second to none.

Recent Posts

Enter the future of shopping: the age of the ai shopping assistant and chatbot, what is zero-party data — and is it the future of ecommerce personalization, shopping trends: shopping has shifted from an intentional to ambient action — here's why, subscribe to the below the fold newsletter.

Standing out on the digital shelf starts with access to the latest industry content. Subscribe to Below the Fold, our monthly content newsletter, and join other commerce leaders.

  • Retail Partners
  • Executive Team
  • Digital Shelf Institute
  • Request Demo
  • Salsify Blog
  • What Is a PIM Solution?

IMAGES

  1. Joint Business Plan 5 Process Steps

    joint business plan what is

  2. 5 Steps Process Of Joint Business Plan

    joint business plan what is

  3. 3 Phases Of Joint Business Plan

    joint business plan what is

  4. 3 Stages For Effective Joint Business Plan

    joint business plan what is

  5. Joint business plan: Definition and tips

    joint business plan what is

  6. Joint Business Planning PowerPoint Presentation Slides

    joint business plan what is

VIDEO

  1. CARA MEMBUAT REKAPITULASI RENCANA USAHA BERSAMA KELOMPOK PERIKANAN

  2. The side effects of joint business

  3. As Etapas de Sucesso do Joint Business Plan

  4. How to Create a Successful Business Plan

  5. Joint Plan Commission and Economic Development Commission 1.22.24

  6. Joint plan