When will partners be able to register deals?

Is it connected to our CRM yet?

What’s the testing plan?

Who’s training the team?

What happens if a partner runs into issues?

Without clear answers, it’s easy to lose internal momentum, or worse, credibility. 

Below, we share a sample project plan that’s worked across hundreds of PRM implementations. It lays out what needs to happen when and who should be involved, so you can keep the project moving—and always have a clear answer ready the next time your exec team checks in.

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 1: Prework

Decide What Modules You Need for an MVP(RM)

Timing: 1-2 days. Don’t spend too much time agonizing over this. It’s better to get your portal up and running, then add more features.

Resources: Partner team

Ideally, you should know what modules you need before you even evaluate PRMs. But there may be modules included in your pricing plan that you’re not sure you need from the get-go.

Our advice? Implement the bare minimum, then iterate.

While you can think you know what partners want and need before you implement your PRM, you can’t possibly predict everything.

The truth is, you won’t know how partners will react until they’re in your Portal. We’ve seen customers be surprised by what partners actually engage with time and again. Things like:

• Unexpected demand for collaboration tools, like Forum
• Very little legal back-and-forth on standard agreements, eliminating the need for a more red-line-heavy e-signature platform
• High adoption of rewards points and SPIFF features

There’s also the fact that you may not be ready to launch everything right away. For example, if you’re not sure you have the internal resources to build a robust training and certification program ahead of your target launch date, work on it behind the scenes while partners get used to the Portal.

The preliminary feedback they give you may even inform how you set up your training program, so it’s worth the wait.

Alert Tangential Teams

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + any other teams that will be connected to the PRM in some way.

Loop in the teams who’ll need to be part of your launch. For example, you’ll likely need the help of:

• Marketing, to add Portal content, create co-branding guidelines, and work with you on launch announcements.
• IT, to figure out if you need SSO, two-factor authentication, a custom domain, and a way to add a partner application to your company website.
• CRM admins, to help with  partner data migration and CRM integration
• Product, to assist with partner training and certification requirements

Getting everyone on the same page about your PRM launch (and leaving some buffer time in your project plan) can save you, and everyone else, from the headache of major blockers down the line. 

Ask 1-2 Trusted Partners for Help

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + several partner points of contact

The worst thing you can do is launch your PRM blind. Get your partner managers to think of a few guinea pigs — partners who are excited to test the portal and to provide real, honest feedback.

Make your request early so they block off time and consider offering them something of value to sweeten the deal, like a gift card, early access, or other kind of public recognition. After all, their input will help you refine the experience before it scales.

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 2: Initial Portal Setup

Configure Portal Settings

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team

Decide on some of the basics. Much of this you’ll already know from running your program — whether you’re using a different PRM right now, or managing everything in email and spreadsheets:

• What your portal is called
• How potential partners will apply to your program, and what it takes for them to get approved
• How partners can get in touch with your team for portal or deal support
• When you’ll prompt partners to update their profiles, and nudge them to log into the portal

You’ll also want to have a sense of how your portal will look and feel. Request a copy of your company’s style guide from your creative team so you can update your PRM’s font, colors, and other branding elements.

And make sure your portal navigation makes sense to partners. For example, if you call the Library module “Resources” when you’re talking to partners, make sure the Library module is called “Resources” in the portal. That way, partners will understand what it is without having to guess.

Nail Down Permissions

Timing: 1-2 days. We recommend starting with an “All Partners” group, and then determining whether you actually need more levels of permission. The more variance in permissions you have, the more variance you have to manage.

Resources: Partner team

Clarify who can view and manage each part of the portal. Will all partners get access to MDF? What about SPIFFs?

You will probably need to go deeper than the module level, too. For instance, should everyone at an organization see their teammates’ deal registrations, or just their own? Should team members be able to register deals on each others’ behalf?

Your internal teams may need different access as well. Should partner managers just be able to see their partners’ activity or all partner activity? Do sales and marketing teams need access to specific modules?

Getting your permissions right from the jump can avoid a situation where partners (and internal teams) have access to something they should not have — and then you’re on the hook to explain why it’s being taken away.

Solidify Partner Management

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team

Define your partner types (i.e. reseller, affiliate, strategic) and lifecycle stages (identified, qualified, contract, closed won), and determine how agreements will be handled (will partners have to sign before entering the portal?).

If business planning is part of your partner strategy, clarify what that looks like and where those plans will live in the portal. Read more about how to develop sound business plans here.

If you work with distributors, get specific about how they’ll be working with partners, particularly on revenue generating activities. Should they be able to register deals for existing partners? Without specifying a partner? For themselves? 

Can they be able to create partners that don’t exist? And if so, do you need to accept them?

Clarifying these rules up front gives everyone, from your partners to your partner managers to CRM admins, a consistent framework to work from, and prevents deal flow from getting tangled in edge cases down the line.

Build a Strong Home Page

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing

The portal Home Page is the first thing partners will see — so it’s got to (1) highlight the most essential information and (2) prompt partners to act. The best things to put on your home page include:

• Quick links to high-use modules like deal reg or training
• Charts and graphs showing their progress
• New resources partners really want and need
• SPIFF opportunities and other announcements

Be sure to include a brief welcome message (perhaps even a welcome video?) and a clear way to reach support to engage and support new partners who may not know their way around the portal yet. 

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 3: Content and Partner Marketing

Upload Content to the Library

Timing: 3-4 days. Uploading content to the library isn’t hard, but it can take a long time depending on how much you have, so we recommend getting this done first.

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing

Most PRMs will let you upload:

• Articles
• Links
• PDFs
• Videos

Make a list of the foundational content that partners will need, like pricing sheets, product overviews, and case studies, and upload those first. Be mindful of how they’re presented, too.

Your folder structure and filters should immediately make sense to partners, not just to you. Use  thumbnails to aid discoverability (you may need to work with marketing to get those created) and add viewability dates for time-sensitive content (SPIFFs, early product release material).

Note: Some PRMs, like Channeltivity, give you the option to bulk upload your content. Reach out to your CSM to see what they can do to accelerate the upload process.

Add Co-Brandable Collateral

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing

Usually decks and one-pagers are the best candidates for co-branded collateral, so start with those. Know where partner logos should go, what text should go on co-branded collateral (i.e., a partner’s company name, and potentially a POC’s email address), and whether partners should be able to make any other edits they want to that piece of content.

Make sure naming conventions are intuitive here too so that partners can quickly find what they need and apply their branding without confusion.

Customize Your To-Partner Marketing

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing

If your PRM comes with an email marketing module, you’ll want to set expectations now for cadence and content ownership. 

• How long will news remain live?
• Who will be writing the announcements (and taking them down)?
• When will to-partner emails get sent out and about what?

Keep it simple now — say 1 partner email per month — so that it’s sustainable. You can always scale up from there.

Organize Your Training & Certification

Timing: 1-2 days

Note: The implementation part should really only take a few days. It’s creating the coursework and evaluations that can take months. You’ll probably want to rope in your enablement, product, and even customer success teams for help with training and cert development.

To set up an enterprise-grade training program, check out: Why You Need Partner Training: How Leading Companies Do It Well.

Resources: Partner team + enablement + product + CS

Great training programs help partners pitch your services, decrease the number of support tickets you get from partner-led deployments, ensure consistent messaging — and ultimately, lead to more closed-won deals. Often, training and certification are required for partners to sell specific products, but they can also be used to gate access to exclusive events or other perks like MDF. 

To get your training and cert off the ground, you’ll need to define the core skills or product knowledge partners need and map those into a set of courses, each with a clear format (PDFs, videos, quizzes) and completion criteria. You should also think about whether you’ll offer downloadable certificates or LinkedIn badges.

Some PRMs, like Channeltivity, have all that functionality built in. But if you plan to use an outside LMS, coordinate with IT and whoever owns licensing to get that set up properly.

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 4: Revenue Modules

Build Out Deal Registration

Timing: 1-2 days. Like training and cert, the actual recreation of your deal reg submission process should only take a few hours. Working out your approval process and CRM sync can take much longer.

Resources: Partner team

What details does your team needs to evaluate partner-submitted deals? Probably what product(s) the potential customer is interested in, estimated close date, deal size, and account information, at the very least.

Our suggestion? Create the same fields in your PRM that you currently have in your CRM or deal registration form. That will make it easier for partners to follow, easier for your partner managers to approve, and easier to sync with your CRM if you’re going that route.

Think also about partner visibility. Will they be adjusting the stage, or will your team? Can they edit the deal post-submission? Decide who on your team will approve deals and what happens if multiple partners claim the same account.

You’ll also need to determine how deal data flows to your CRM. In most cases, it’s smart to route partner-entered fields into separate custom fields to avoid overwriting what your sales team tracks internally — you don’t want to mess up any dashboards being sent to leadership.

For help configuring an enterprise-level deal reg program, check out: Perfect Your Deal Registration Process in 7 Steps.

Create Your Referral Form

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team

Referrals can be as lightweight or as structured as you need. At a minimum, set clear expectations: 

• What fields need to be filled out on a referral form
• What counts as a qualified referral
• What partners get in return
• How they’ll track progress

Many programs offer a revenue share, but other options — like co-marketing support, event access, or lead reciprocation — can be just as valuable.

Want to make sure your referrals are hitting all the right marks? Check out: How to Ace Referral Management in 5 Steps.

Lock Down Lead Distribution

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team

Lead distribution is basically the inverse of referrals — you’re sending leads to partners. So think about what they need to convert your lead into a deal registration.

What data do they need to know? (where did the lead come from, what are they interested in, etc.)

What did you tell the lead?

How much time do they have to act on the lead?

Build in escalation paths for unresponsive partners so you can pass leads on to other partners who are eager to jump on the deal. And make it easy for partners to accept the lead and convert it into a deal registration — they shouldn’t have to duplicate records or re-enter data.

Structure Your MDF

Timing: 2-3 days

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing + finance

In most partner programs, partners are only eligible for marketing development funds if they meet certain sales targets or achieve specific performance metrics. That means you’ll need to determine who qualifies for MDF, and what activities you’re willing to fund.

Partners should submit a simple proposal outlining the activity, expected outcome, and budget. Your team will review it against marketing goals and available funds (this is where you’ll want to involve your marketing and finance peers), approves or rejects it, and sets expectations for how reimbursement or payment will work — whether that’s direct payment, invoice reimbursement, or account credits.

Finally, make sure you can track what happened.

Require basic documentation, confirm funds were used as intended, and report on outcomes like pipeline influence or lead volume. If you can’t tie MDF activity back to results, it becomes harder to defend the budget next quarter.

Set Up Your SPIFFs

Timing: 1-2 days

Resources: Partner team + finance

SPIFFs are short-term incentive programs designed to drive urgency, but they only work if your partner expectations are crystal clear. To start working on your campaigns you’ll need: 

• Descriptions
• Payout amounts
• Deadlines
• Qualification rules

You’ll also want to outline how claims are reviewed and who owns approvals.

If your finance team needs to audit SPIFFs before payment, bake that into your internal SLAs. And if you plan to run multiple campaigns at once, stagger launch dates or use targeting rules to avoid confusion and make sure your partners get paid quickly. That builds long-term trust in the program, even if the incentives change over time.

Prep Your CRM Sync

Timing: 4-5 days. In reality, the prep work should only take a few hours. But most CRM admins have a ton on their plate, so you’ll need to give them some time to prioritize your request.

Resources: Partner team + CRM admin

To get the most out of your PRM, you’ll want to connect it to your CRM. Your admin will not only need to set up an integration user to connect the two systems, they’ll also likely have to create certain custom fields in your CRM and be ready to map all of your partner organization, user, deal registration, referral, and lead distribution fields from your PRM to your CRM.

If you’re using distributors, you’ll want to confirm that your sync setup can account for their unique role, like submitting on behalf of other partners or creating new partner records that need review.

Everyone has their CRM set up a particular way. No matter which one you use, there will be kinks in the process. Having this prep work done earlier in the implementation gives you time to fix those glitches before you roll out the portal to your partners and internal teams. 

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 5: Testing & Launch Logistics

Test Your CRM Sync

Timing: 3-5 days

Resources: Partner team + CRM admin

Before opening the doors to partners, confirm that your CRM integration works end-to-end. That means:

• Creating a new partner organization and users and making sure they flow into your CRM as accounts and contacts.
• Updating accounts and contacts in your CRM and making sure those changes flow into your PRM (and vice versa).
• Making sure new deal registrations and referrals appear as leads in your CRM.
• You can send leads directly to your partners from your CRM.
• Converting leads to opportunities in your CRM and making sure the connection doesn’t break on those records in your PRM.

Use impersonation tools to walk through everything from a partner’s perspective and look closely at edge cases. You want clean data and smooth handoffs from day one.

Start Pre-Launch Marketing

Timing: 3-5 days

Resources: Partner team + partner marketing

Your PRM won’t get used just because it’s live. Partners need a reason to log in, and a clear path to value once they do. Build awareness ahead of your launch with a focused communication plan. Here are some examples of what you might include in your pre-launch marketing:

• A new incentive structure
• The quick and easy deal reg or MDF request process
• A screenshot of your home page or other important pieces of the portal
• Training and certification highlights
• Quotes from partners who went through beta testing

Distribute this info across all your partner touchpoints: email, shared Slack or Teams channels, regular partner meetings, newsletters, and your next webinar. A single announcement won’t cut it: repeat the message so that it sticks.

Internally, keep momentum high by recognizing the teams who made the launch possible. A well-run rollout is as much a cultural win as it is a technical one.

Want a more in-depth look at what good partner enablement looks like? Read: Partner Enablement Program Design in 8 Steps.

Do a Soft Roll Out

Timing: 1 week. You want to give your partners enough time to poke around and give constructive criticism.

Resources: Partner team + handful of partners. Too many cooks in the kitchen can cause feedback overload that slows down your launch. You can always ask for broader feedback later.

Before you invite trusted partners to test, run all the workflows you want them to run impersonating a fake partner user. Check that modules are accessible, dashboards populate correctly, notifications get triggered, and nothing breaks.

Then, contact those trusted partners you identified in week one to explore the portal before your full launch. Have them test core actions such as:

• Setting up their account
• Inviting colleagues to the portal
• Finding and downloading pricing and one-pagers
• Running through a training course
• Registering a deal
• Submitting a referral
• Requesting MDF

Gather feedback, document issues, and fix what matters most. Keep the test group small so you can respond quickly, but diverse enough to catch blind spots. This is your last chance to make meaningful improvements before opening the floodgates.

PRM Launch Project Plan – Week 6: Final Checks

Adjust Based On Partner Feedback

Timing: 3-5 days, depending on the extent of feedback.

Resources: Partner team

You’ll probably get a lot of suggestions from internal users and early partners, but not all of them need to be actioned.

Focus on the feedback that improves usability, fixes friction in critical workflows, or helps your team scale. Set the rest aside for post-launch improvements. Remember, you’re on a timeline here!

Establish Your Reporting Framework

Timing: 2-3 days

Resources: Partner team

Set up dashboards for key metrics you’ll want to monitor, like deal volume, portal logins, training completions, content downloads, and partner activity by type. That way, you’re not scrambling when your first QBR rolls around.

If your PRM offers built-in analytics, use them. Giving partners visibility into their own performance can reinforce behavior without more manual outreach. And it gives your team the context needed to improve the program over time.

Want a set of KPIs for every module? Check out Partner Analytics: What It Is and How to Do It.

Want a Portal That Can Actually Get Implemented in 6 Weeks (or Less)?

Look no further than Channeltivity. Schedule a demo to see how fast you can go live with your enterprise channel program.

Not quite ready for a demo?

See how Recorded Future (a Mastercard company) got its PRM up and running in 5 weeks — with just two dedicated resources.

The post The Ultimate PRM Launch Project Plan: Resources and Timing appeared first on Channeltivity.

But when markets get shaky, partnerships stay steady. They’re one of the few ways to grow without leaning on cold outbound or expensive acquisition.

They support customer retention, influence renewal decisions, and unlock upsell and cross-sell opportunities that sales teams wouldn’t necessarily find or close on their own. The trick is finding (and nurturing) the partners that can guide you through the turbulence.

Before the year comes to a close, we decided to round up nine strategies for finding partners that can help you ride the wave.

9 Ways to Find New Partners in 2026

1. Strengthen Your Current Partnerships

Before you reach out to any new partners, make sure you’ve maximized the value of the partners you already have. Tapping into that network can lead to hotter leads far faster than building new relationships from scratch.

So, take a minute to review your partner enablement and engagement strategies:

• Do they know what’s expected of them and how to move up in tier?
• Can they easily access pricing sheets, training, and marketing materials?
• Have they been consistently bringing in new referrals and registering deals?
• Are your incentives actually good?
• Are they logging into your portal?

If the answer is no, invest some time into turning that into a yes. If you’re not sure, ask your partners — and not just the ones you know and love.

In fact, you may even want to ask partners who didn’t join your roster this year to hop on a quick call. You may come away with other ideas to improve your program and, ultimately, your partner-sourced revenue.

For example, maybe:

• You’re missing compliance requirements. SOC 2 and similar certifications are deal-breakers for enterprise partners. Bring that feedback to your CISO to see if you can help move that process along.
• They didn’t see a clear path to joint revenue. Consider revising your messaging and positioning with your partner marketing team.
• They worried about the lift on their team. Simplify onboarding steps, create new documentation, or design a lighter-weight co-selling path.

2. Revisit Your Ideal Partner Profile

Your ideal partner profile (IPP) from last year might be drastically different from the one you use in 2026. Markets evolve, ecosystems shift, and AI has forced almost every vendor into new categories.

A refined IPP will help you:

• Improve partner portal engagement
• Generate more sales-qualified leads
• Increase brand presence through co-marketing
• Strengthen alignment across sales, marketing, and partnerships

As Stacy Desrosiers at Lewis Rhodes Labs told us, “You need to understand who your partners are, why they’re participating in your program, and if you’re incentivizing them enough. Without that baseline information, you can’t possibly support your channel in the way they expected you to, whether the economy is in a recession or not.”

Need help formalizing your IPP? Here’s a step-by-step guide. 

3. Review New Integration Requests

Most requests for new integrations flow directly to product, but they should also flow to partnerships. If multiple customers are asking for the same integration, that vendor should be on your radar.

Before you set up a call with them, do a little due diligence yourself.

Talk to industry peers you trust who may have worked with that company in the past, and definitely talk to customers who’ve had the platform as part of their tech stack for at least a year. Ideally, you’d talk to the business analyst, the person in IT, and the department owner of the tool to get a clear view of:

1. Whether the tool is sticky
2. Whether the company supports integrations well
3. Whether customers would be excited about a partnership between the two platforms

If a potential partner hits all three, they’re likely worth pursuing.

4. Find New Partners By Talking to Your Customers

Customers are basically a free funnel of market information. They’re paying close attention to up-and-coming tools in their industry through channels you may not even know about.

In a conversation on r/SaaS about B2B lead gen, Redditor stuartlogan points out: “The most reliable lead gen actually comes from your existing customer base – most completely overlook asking for referrals, but it converts at like 10x higher rates than cold outreach.”

That goes for partner referrals, too. If you can, request a slight modification to your customer success team’s monthly surveys or NPS to add one question:

What tools or agencies have been most helpful to you this quarter?

You might even consider monetizing it. For every partner referral that joins your program, customers can receive a monthly discount, a gift card, or another incentive that aligns with your brand.

If you notice more than one enterprise customer is using a specific tool or consulting firm, chances are, they should be on your partner roster. And you already have a warm intro: your mutual customer. Do some quality enablement, create a joint case study, and boom, you’ve got yourself a successful partnership.

5. Plug Your IPP Into Clay

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Clay. Most people assume Clay’s just for sales and marketing, but it can actually be a huge boon for partnerships. Liz Melton, a freelance writer and consultant for B2B SaaS companies, wrote about how Clay might be used for partnerships for Zapier:

“I used to work in partnerships, so I instantly thought to use Clay as a way to build a list of companies that fit an ideal partner profile. All you have to do is plug in all of the specific attributes, and you’ll have a whole list to work from.”

It can even work for finding B2B influencers: “You can filter based on keywords, followers, and engagement rate (and more filters), and pull in their contact information right away.”

Once you’ve built a list of potential partners, Clay’s native outreach features make it easy to build a template and send intro emails — straight from the platform.

Or, you could use Clay’s AI agent, Claygent, to limit your list to contacts who are a first or second connection to current customers, partners, advisors, or investors who can facilitate an intro for you.

6. Scour Reddit to Find New Partners

Reddit is where people go to share their real opinions, and it’s a great place to find potential partners — in conversations about your industry, your product, your competitors, your partners.

That being said, it’s hard to monitor those conversations yourself. Look for tools like Relato that can do the work for you.

With Relato, all you have to do is write a prompt. The agent will scan Reddit for posts, replies, and mentions, analyze their sentiment, assess opportunities, and send you a report via email.

7. Get Inspo From Other Industries

There’s plenty of inspiration for unexpected (yet effective) partnerships in B2C. Take a close look at your favorite food brands, retailers, or subscription services. Who are they partnered with?

How do you think they made the case for it? Is there something similar you can do in your industry?

If you’re extra curious, find their head of partnerships on LinkedIn and ask if you can buy them a virtual coffee. If you’re not comfortable with that, scan your network and see if any friends in gaming, healthcare, fintech, or CPG might be willing to chat. Talking shop with someone in a totally different space can be a catalyst for creativity.

8. Join Partner Communities

This builds on #5 — it’s really hard to think about partnerships in new ways if you’re constantly talking to the same people. So, get out there and meet some more!

You never know, that person you strike up a conversation with at happy hour might just be your “in” with a whale of a partner you’ve been trying to get access to for a while. Small talk with someone from a completely different vertical might clue you into a place to look for partners you hadn’t considered before.

If you’re not sure where to start, join Partnership Leaders.

It’s a 2,100+ member community that hosts roughly 400 events a year in all different cities across the globe. Its annual conference, Catalyst, is one of the best places to connect with and learn from your peers.

9. Show Up in the Right Media Channels to Find New Partners

Partner recruitment isn’t just an outbound play. The more visible your brand is, the more likely partners are to reach out on their own.

To drive that interest, you need to show up where potential partners already spend time. Think popular newsletters, industry podcasts, influencer Substacks. Just be thoughtful about your pitch. Redditor erickrealz warns:

“Expect limited interest without proven performance metrics. YouTube creators and newsletter writers in your niche will be more receptive to partnerships if you can show genuine value for their audiences. Most experienced affiliates want to see conversion data and customer testimonials before promoting new tools.”

A good place to start is by publishing executive thought leadership on LinkedIn or in Slack communities. Being genuinely useful (i.e., sharing real tactics, real case studies, real frameworks) helps your product gain credibility with the right audiences.

Set Yourself Up For a Banner 2026

According to research from Partnership Leaders, a substantial percentage of organizations derive between 30-60% of their revenue from partnerships, and those that do have higher close rates and larger deal sizes — even when times are tough. So, if you can build a solid partner program now, you’ll be in great shape for what’s to come: AI bubble or not.

But as your ecosystem grows, you’ll need a reliable way to manage it. Channeltivity is the PRM for enterprise partner teams, centralizing everything from partner education to partner marketing to partner performance tracking. And it syncs directly with your CRM, whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, or Microsoft Dynamics.

Book a demo to see how Channeltivity can help you scale your partner program in 2026 (and beyond).

The post Where to Find New B2B SaaS Partners in 2026 appeared first on Channeltivity.

Yes, you need a capable leader who can recruit great partner managers, build the right marketing motion, and design a clear vision for growth.

But even the best players need a shared system — a single place to manage data, deals, and communication — and a defined structure for how the program runs.

Just look at any other GTM team. Are they running their programs without a core set of software designed just for them and their day-to-day? Likely not. And partnerships shouldn’t either.

Below, we take a closer look at why partner program management matters, what it entails, and when to start thinking about it.

The Case for Partner Program Management

When most companies start their partner program, they run it manually. At first, keeping track of partner activity in spreadsheets and emails can work, but it gets real untenable real fast. And at enterprise companies, that approach simply can’t fly.

• Deals aren’t handed off properly to partners or sales teams, forcing prospects to rerun through lengthy discovery processes or causing errors on RFPs.
• A lack of approval processes can stall referral payouts and MDF claims, frustrating partners and your finance team.
• Pipeline forecasts become guesswork because the data lives in a dozen different systems.
• When leadership asks for a performance report, your team spends days stitching together metrics from Salesforce, spreadsheets, and shared drives.

Ameer Draidy at design agency Circular Design shared a “near disaster” with deal registration as a result of a disorganized manual process: 

“The moment I knew we had to change was when we nearly paid commission on the same $50,000 deal to two different partners. One had registered it via an email to me, and another had submitted it through a Google Form we were testing. Neither was logged correctly in the master spreadsheet.”

For Daniel Dantus at AI agent platform, Skan AI, the turning point came when the company began scaling globally. 

“We were onboarding 3–4 new partners a week, and our ‘Google Sheet PRM’ just couldn’t keep up. Partners were emailing us asking for updates we couldn’t give in real-time, and internally, it became clear that we had no consistent way to track metrics like influenced revenue or partner health.”

Sure, But What If You Already Have a PRM?

Even if you have a PRM, it might not be set up correctly or have everything you need as your program matures.

At Channeltivity, we’ve seen this story play out hundreds of times.

Prospects come to us having had little success with their partner program, but seem to think that a new hire who “has run partnerships before” will magically turn things around. That’s a lot of pressure to put on one person — and it’s not realistic without the right system behind them.

Eventually, your partner team ends up back where it started: buried in manual tasks. Aaron Howerton, RevOps Architect at GoNimbly, put it well on LinkedIn: 

“Companies struggle with partnerships because they fail to realize that the key to automation is access to structured data. They want to track attribution, but aren’t tracking any of the work that is required to GET to attribution. No program management, no contracts, no foundation to build attribution from.

Many times, they’ve also bought a PRM solution and they’re still struggling to show impact and tell the story of partnerships to their leaders.”

So, what should you be looking for, outside of that mythical “fix everything” hire?

6 Elements of Enterprise Partner Program Management

Effective partner program management mirrors other high-performing GTM teams. It’s built on consistent processes, measurable data, and purpose-built software that supports every stage of the partnership lifecycle.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

1. Centralized Visibility

There needs to be one place where everyone — your team, your partners, even your C-suite execs (though, let’s be real, they’ll never log in) — can access partner data in real time.

As Redditor RIP200712 advises, “Scope out the changes you need in order to track and measure your channel performance. That should be P0.”

Why? Because visibility enhances everyone’s experience:

• Partners want to find their contracts easily, reference their business plans, and know where they stand with their referral, deal, and lead distribution pipelines.
• Your team needs to track those details and see broader activity: who’s logging in, who’s downloading co-branded marketing content, who’s getting certified, who’s requesting MDF, who’s registering deals, and who’s moving up in tier.

That data tells your partner team how to operate. They can funnel even more resources to the partners who are excelling (to push more deals over the finish line) and reach out to the ones who are falling behind to see where they can offer the most help.

• Your leadership gains confidence that the dream partner team they put together is actually putting their money where their mouth is.

How to get it: You can’t do any of this with a basic PRM, let alone a spreadsheet. You need a partner portal that can handle bi-directional syncing with your CRM and with a tool like Zapier that can send and receive PRM data to virtually any other platform in your stack.

“Connection to our CRM was important, but the actual advantage was visibility,” Danilo Coviello at Espresso Translations emphasizes. 

“Our PRM did the ‘under-the-carpet’ work so that the team could concentrate on developing stronger connections rather than pursuing updates. The moment the whole thing resided under one roof, there was a sense of relief in communication and purer reporting.”

2. Strong Data Governance

As your partner program grows, so does the amount of sensitive data you manage, from customer details to deal information to MDF budgets. Having that floating around in spreadsheets that people may upload to ChatGPT or Claude doesn’t scream security.

A Partner Portal with strong data governance can help you keep everything in check.

It defines who can access what (internally and externally) and how information flows between systems. Your partner portal should have native role-based permissions to ensure only the right people can view, download, edit, and delete sensitive information.

How to get it: Look for a PRM with enterprise-grade security and built-in compliance. Think: SOC 2-aligned infrastructure, GDPR compliance for lead distribution, and configurable role-based access control (RBAC) so you can customize permissions by partner type, tier, or region.

3. Scalable Partner Communications

Keeping partners informed shouldn’t depend on someone remembering to send an email. A consistent cadence of updates, incentives, and performance summaries helps partners stay engaged — but only if communication happens where they already are.

The best partner program management systems help you automate communication. They send alerts for unopened leads, expiring MDF requests, or deals that need attention, either from the partner or vendor.

At the very least, it should have self-serve dashboards to show everyone with access to the portal a quick view of what’s happening, where things stand, and what needs follow-up.

How to get it: Find a PRM with prebuilt notifications and reminders you can configure and update yourself. You might also look for a PRM with a Forum module, so that partners can ask questions and learn from each other.

4. Integrated Deal Registration

If your partner and sales teams aren’t looking at the same pipeline, everyone is flying blind. Disconnected tools create data gaps that lead to confusion and lost deals.

We’ve somewhat touched on integrations earlier in Centralized Visibility, but it’s worth doubling down on here. Knowing that deal registrations, referrals, and lead distributions are directly connected to your CRM gives you and your partners peace of mind — everyone (including sales teams and anyone else with access to your CRM) can see what’s registered, what’s approved, and what’s closed.

Everyone works from a single, accurate view of the pipeline.

How to get it: Evaluate PRMs that offer native two-way integrations with your CRM, whether it be Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, or Zoho. That way, every opportunity stays in sync from registration through close. No duplicate entry, no missing details, no missing updates.

One of our customers, Recorded Future (now a Mastercard company), used our deal registration sync to scale their partner program globally.

“We closed several partner-led deals in just a few months. One of the best things about Channeltivity is that I’m able to pull granular KPIs in just a few seconds,” says Billy Cannon, the Director of the Partner Development Center.

5. Streamlined Onboarding and Enablement

A strong partner program makes it easy for partners to get started and even easier to stay engaged. Without automation, onboarding and enablement quickly become bottlenecks. Partner managers get multiple requests for marketing materials and one-off training calls.

Automated onboarding workflows, self-guided training, and certification modules remove that friction. Partners can learn at their own pace while you track progress, approvals, and performance in one place.

How to get it: A PRM that includes an LMS (or can integrate directly with one) is your best bet. That way, you can build and track onboarding and partner training programs directly inside your portal. Make it easy for them to find that information, too — with short and sweet onboarding emails and links straight to these modules from your portal’s homepage.

6. Marketing Collaboration

When partners can easily access campaign materials, request MDF, and co-brand collateral, they’re more likely to promote your products.

The problem is that, without a dedicated partner portal, marketing collaboration often lives across scattered folders, forms, and emails. A centralized, secure hub solves that, giving partners a single place to find what they need and track results.

How to get it: Assess PRMs that give partners the ability to co-brand your marketing materials and request marketing development funds to further their sales efforts. You should also make sure the portal includes a resource library where partners can watch product videos, pull relevant case studies, and review competitive battlecards.

One of our customers, Black Box, uses Channeltivity’s resource library and co-branded collateral module to refine their marketing strategy.

Per David Isola, Director of Product Marketing, “Seeing what content partners are pulling from the Library tells us a lot — what’s popular, and what we should spend more time creating.”

When Should You Start Thinking About Partner Program Management?

Before you need it. Most teams wait until they’re buried in spreadsheets and partner requests before they start looking for a system. They need enough partners to warrant buying an actual tool, right?

But the thing is, each new partner adds layers of complexity — more leads, more deals, more people touching the process. Without at least some rules of engagement, approval processes, and data tracking (even if it’s manual), that complexity compounds fast.

Getting a PRM a little earlier than you think you need it can pay off big time in the form of:

• Shorter onboarding cycles
• Higher partner engagement rates
• More partner-sourced and influenced revenue
• Greater visibility for leadership and RevOps

Structured program management gives partnership teams the data they need to prove impact, not just promise it. The sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

The Best Leaders Bet On Systems

Companies building well-run partner ecosystems aren’t adding headcount and hoping for the best. They’re investing in systems that make their people more effective. That’s exactly what Channeltivity was designed to support. It’s got:

• Configurable workflows for different partner types and regions
• Training, certification, and enablement tools to keep partners active
• Straightforward deal registration that keeps sales and partners in sync
• Deep, bidirectional CRM integrations that are easy to manage

It even has global enterprise features like built-in multi-language translation. The best part? You can get up and running almost immediately.

As Recorded Future’s team put it, “Standing up enterprise partner portals can take months, even with multiple resources working on it. The Channeltivity team met all of our security and Salesforce integration requirements in less than 6 weeks — and we only had 2 people working on it on our side.”

Curious about what Channeltivity can do for your partner program?

Book a demo today and find out.

The post Proper Partner Program Management Needs a System, Not Just a New Hire appeared first on Channeltivity.

But more often than not, partner training feels a whole lot like your boring annual compliance training (sorry, security teams).

Most people “watch” videos on 2x speed, click through modules while they’re multitasking, and guess their way through quizzes just to move on. That doesn’t scream knowledge retention, does it?

Yet that knowledge is something partners desperately need. Without it, they can’t market and sell your product — let alone implement it. So, how do you build training that sticks?

To find out, we asked seasoned channel leaders how they’ve approached the challenge. Below, you’ll learn why partner training is more critical than ever, and how to design programs that are more than a hoop to jump through. But first, let’s refresh your memory on what partner training is.

Partner Training & Certification, Partner Enablement, Partner Onboarding: What’s the Difference?

As with anything in B2B SaaS, these terms get thrown around interchangeably. But they aren’t quite the same:

• Partner Onboarding happens first — right when partners join your program. Think of it like the welcome stage: partners sign agreements, get introduced to a partner manager, log into your PRM for the first time, and start building business plans.
• Partner Enablement is broader and ongoing. It covers the tools, updates, and support that give partners the ability (and motivation) to sell and deliver your product, whether that’s through new sales playbooks and co-branded collateral, new tiering rules, or new product feature updates.
• Partner Training & Certification is a more structured, formal training program. Think courses, exams, and credentials that validate a partner’s knowledge. Often, training and certification are required for partners to sell specific products, and it can also unlock access to exclusive events or other perks like MDF.

While training and certification sit under the enablement umbrella, they deserve their own attention. Onboarding sets the foundation and enablement keeps momentum — but training is what builds partner competence.

Why Have a Partner Training Program?

A strong partner training program isn’t about checking boxes. It’s about preparing your partners to represent your product the right way.

Skip it (or do it poorly), and partners might misrepresent features or overpromise on features you don’t have or use cases your product can’t tackle.

This has lasting ripple effects, from confusing and frustrating customers to losing trust with internal teams to uneven performance across your partner base. Yehor Melnykov at Loio (a legal platform) put it bluntly: “Legal work is sensitive, and we couldn’t risk partners giving clients the wrong impression of how Loio should be used. Certification gives us that control.”

On the flip side, great training programs:

• Help partners pitch effectively (and close more deals)
• Decrease support tickets from partner-led deployments
• Ensure consistent messaging across every customer interaction
• Create better alignment among internal teams — everyone has to decide what’s important for partners to know

Dirk Alshuth at emma (cloud management) saw the difference when his team introduced partner training: “Without standardized training, implementation quality varied too much from one partner to another. Partner training brings consistency, trust, and efficiency — certified partners deliver smoother deployments, which means fewer escalations for us to deal with.”

9 Steps to Building a Robust Partner Training Program

So how do you create a program that delivers great results? Especially if you’re starting from scratch?

Here are ten steps to help you get your partner training off the ground — and avoid the pitfalls that cause most programs to stall.

1. Put Training on Internal Teams’ Radar 

Yes, this seems like an odd first step, but you can’t build a partner training program in a silo. Marketing, product, and customer success teams all hold critical knowledge and skills that you’ll need when putting your learning program together.

Daniel Shapiro at Red Points (brand protection software) leaned on the customer success team at first. “They already had the product knowledge, so we shaped that into training modules,” he shares.

Justin Wheeler at Funraise (nonprofit software) worked closely with product. “Our product team and a few power users collaborated to design the first version. That gave it a practical, real-world angle from day one,” he says.

“We started with mission critical areas like donation processing, campaign setup, and reporting, because if partners got those wrong, it directly impacted nonprofit outcomes.”

The problem is, these folks are incredibly busy, and helping the partner team isn’t at the top of their priority list. That means you’ll need a compelling pitch to get on it.

As Stacy Desrosiers told us in a different article, “There are so many things the channel can give. They have a pulse on larger market dynamics, customer requirements, intel on pricing and licensing. They just have a much broader view.”

Training can create value for every internal stakeholder:

• Product gets visibility into how partners use the solution in the wild, which can highlight feature gaps and even uncover bugs.
• Customer Success sees where partners tend to get stuck, which helps them plan better onboarding and support.
• Marketing gains insight into which messages resonate in the field, sharpening campaigns and collateral.

Whatever you do, involve these teams early and keep them in the loop. Their contributions will shape a stronger program.

2. Decide Where Your Training Will Live

You need to know where your training will live before you create your content because the way the platform is set up can impact your design. For example, if they don’t support SCORM files, you may not be able to reuse content that your internal teams have created.

The two most common places to put your training include:

1. Your Partner Portal

A PRM with built-in training functionality keeps everything in one place. Channeltivity, for example, lets you set up Courses and Certifications with online learning content in any format (including rich text, video, PDF, SCORM, AICC, cmi5, or xAPI) and dictate which partners can see and interact with the content. It also comes with the ability to honor in-person training credits, distribute certificates, and post digital badges on LinkedIn.

That last feature might matter more than you think — particularly if you’re working with enterprise partners and customers.

Peter Barnett at Action1 (patch management) emphasizes, “We underestimated how much partners valued recognition. At first, certification was just a PDF. Once we added digital badges, adoption skyrocketed.”

2. An LMS

LMSs are designed specifically for online learning, and you may already have one with most of the necessary content in place.

However, you’ll need to figure out a way to connect it to your partner portal, or at least make it easy for partners to access it (and that may mean buying more pricey user licenses). And if you host any live trainings, you’ll need to figure out a way to track them.

If partners have to jump through hoops or manage multiple logins, completion rates will drop. Keep the entry point simple and tied to tools they already use.

3. Take a Close Look at Your Partner Base

If you have a small program and most of your partners look the same, it may make sense to have just one sales training program and one implementation program.

But if you’ve got a huge channel program with all types of partners, you’re going to need a lot more variations in your coursework — a VAR managing complex deployments requires far deeper training than a referral partner who just needs to know your value prop.

This is where your partner managers are invaluable. They spend the most time with your partners and can tell you where partners are struggling and need guidance. Once you’ve got a handle on what kinds of coursework you’ll need to develop, set goals by partner type. Here’s an example:

• Referral partners
  • Goal: ensure accurate messaging so partners know who to refer.
  • Track: certification rates and qualified lead volume.
• VARs and integrators 
  • Goal: shorten time to deployment and increase customer satisfaction scores.
  • Track: Time to deploy, CSAT, reduced escalations.

4. Create a Rough Outline

The next step is to sketch out your curriculum. At this stage, it doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should cover the essentials.

At minimum, include:

• Product knowledge: the features, use cases, and limitations of your product. For partners who implement it, this has to be really thorough, from high-level architecture to configuration considerations to integrations.
• Positioning: who it’s for, what problems it solves, and how to differentiate against competitors
• Sales methodology: how to run discovery, build proposals, and close deals
• Objection handling: the tough questions partners will hear in the field and how to answer them

Creating this content takes time and resources. Even if you have a healthy budget, it pays to design materials that can be used to train channel partners and internal staff. Multi-purpose content also reinforces a shared language. When your staff and partners talk about your product the same way, it reduces confusion for customers and keeps messaging consistent.

Once your outline is drafted, validate it with your peers. This step is critical. You don’t want partners spreading the wrong marketing message. You don’t want your customer success team fielding angry calls because a partner promised a feature that doesn’t exist. And you certainly don’t want to have to explain to your product team why a partner misconfigured a customer’s instance.

5. Put Together the Training

Now it’s time to turn your outline into content. Before you get to work, think carefully about format. Some modules work best as video walkthroughs, others as roleplays or hands-on labs. Remember, you’re not trying to flood partners with information. You’re trying to help them retain and apply it.

Partners will check out if you force them to sit through an hour-long video. Bite-sized, scenario-based learning can be far more effective. Daniel highlights: “We underestimated how important engagement was. Our early materials felt too much like lectures, and completion rates were low. Adding interactive elements resolved the issue.”

If you have the budget, it might make sense to hire some help. A third party can help you brainstorm new and fun ways to engage partners that you hadn’t thought of. Bogdan Condurache at Brizy (website builder), brought in a training consultant “to help us structure the first courses and make sure they were engaging and not just technical PDFs.”

A Note for Global Partner Programs

If you run a global partner program, localization is a non-negotiable. Start with a core curriculum in your primary language, then adapt as needed. Per Bogdan, “We built a core curriculum in English, then localized it step by step, adapting for legal requirements, regional use cases, and translating into key partner languages.”

If you have a presence in some of those regions, it might make sense to at least introduce the training program (if not give the training) in person.

Peter shares, “We focused on a mix of self-paced e-learning and regional partner webinars. That allowed us to keep a unified global curriculum but still address things like data residency laws in specific regions.”

6. Pilot With Trusted Partners

After you have a draft of your training content, test it out with a small group of partners. Pick ones who will give honest feedback so you can catch errors and refine confusing sections before your official launch.

It’ll also give you an opportunity to track engagement and see whether the content aligns with how partners actually sell and implement your product. Consider sending them a gift card or early access to new resources to thank them for their time and input.

7. Market the Training (and Incentives)

Treat your training like any other launch — you need to build buzz and make participation rewarding (not just mandatory). A good way to do this is to emphasize recognition opportunities. 

Digital badges on LinkedIn or listings in a public partner directory give partners credibility and visibility. You might also tie certifications to tiering so they see a direct link between training and benefits.

Redditor PartnerManaged points out, “Comp is king. If your partners can make money selling your solution (ideally paired with additional alliance or service attachments), they’ll be asking YOU for more enablement.”

Lean on others for support. Marketing, for instance, can help you edit your copy, design visuals, or even make suggestions for how to roll out your announcements. Partner managers can bring up training during partner check-ins and QBRs.

8. Survey Partners

The best way to find gaps in your training is to talk to partners. Post-launch, use analytics in your PRM or LMS to see which partners are dropping off and when. Form a list of questions for them, and ask to speak with them so you can gather more detailed context. Then, actually make changes based on their feedback. Doing so will garner a lot of goodwill.

Redditor Happy_Hippo48 posted great advice in r/techsales: “I’ve worked both in a OEM channel role and at a partner. Be responsive to them and own any issue they have when they bring it to you. If they trust you and your company and you solve a real problem for their customers, the business and the certifications will follow.”

That said, don’t exclusively focus on the partners who didn’t resonate with training. Talk to partners who rave about your training, too. You might even be able to create mini case studies about their success that will help you promote training to other partners.

9. Set a Recurring Update

Your product will change, your brand will change, and partner expectations will change — and your partner training needs to keep up.

Plan refresh cycles at least once a year. Better yet, tie updates directly to your product release schedule. That way, every new feature launch or messaging change is automatically paired with updated training material.

“The biggest mistake we made early on was underestimating how fast the product evolved. Certifications went stale quickly,” says Adil Advani at Securiti (data security). “We solved this by tying training updates directly to release cycles, so every feature launch triggered a content refresh.”

Don’t forget to point partners toward ongoing enablement, too. Refresher courses, new collateral, or exclusive sessions with your product team help keep them engaged and ensure they always have access to the latest information.

Make Partner Training a Competitive Advantage

Strong partner training creates alignment, reduces risk, and turns partners into confident advocates for your brand. The challenge is keeping it consistent and measurable, particularly at the enterprise level.

That’s where Channeltivity shines. Admins can:

• Deliver training directly in the partner portal your teams already use in virtually any format,
• Track who is taking courses, what questions they’re getting right and wrong, and whether they’ve gotten a certification.
• Issue digital badges that partners can display on LinkedIn.
• Keep content fresh with simple updates and adjustable permissions.

Ready to see how it works? Schedule a demo today.

The post Why You Need Partner Training: How Leading Companies Do It Well appeared first on Channeltivity.

They’re the ones streamlining handoffs, building enablement paths, monitoring SLAs, and implementing the tooling that makes relationships scale. And they’re still a very much needed resource, even with all the AI tools out there.

Yes, AI can surface anomalies, automate some of the more tedious processes going on behind the scenes, and help draft QBR slides. But it can’t:

• Align incentives across two companies
• Fix a mismatched revenue-share model
• Rebuild trust after a missed SLA
• Prioritize trade-offs when everything feels urgent

Below, we talk more about how crucial this role is, how AI changes the work (and how it doesn’t), and what to look for in your first partner operations hire.

What’s Partner Operations?

Partner operations is the person or team in charge of the entire back office of your program — they keep everything running smoothly, for your team, tangential teams (sales, marketing, finance, product), and partners.

As Raegan Wilson, who consults top partner teams at Spur Reply, puts it:

“If I had to sum it up, a partner operations manager or team puts a structure around your program and holds people accountable to it. They’ve got i’s dotted and t’s crossed on every business process that touches partnerships and make improvements to those processes over time, and work cross-functionally to make sure things are running smoothly.”

What Partner Operations Handles

Often, they take care of PRM implementation and maintenance, which comes with a whole host of duties:

• Getting alignment from the partner team on how they want onboarding and enablement workflows to work, building those flows out, then testing them.
• Integrating the PRM with the company’s CRM and working with the admin to make sure channel account managers and partners are seeing what they’re supposed to see.
• Uploading content to the resource library or co-branded collateral modules, which requires close collaboration with marketing (or partner marketing).
• Streamlining partner onboarding and explaining program rules to new partners. This could involve live webinars, training and certification, videos or rules displayed in the portal, office hours, and/or excellent documentation.
• Ensuring contracts are signed and each partner has a business plan so partners start off on the right foot and the business stays compliant.
• Continuously checking on partner health via reports and dashboards. If each partner manager has a large number of partners to manage, partner operations may notify them of partners who are slipping or move partners into new tiers as soon as they meet the necessary requirements.
• Manage the referral and deal pipeline. If a lead or opportunity has been sitting in a status for too long or hasn’t had much activity, they flag it and help get the right people to nudge it along. They also forecast partner revenue on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• Ensuring partners receive payment for qualified referrals, closed deals, or MDF.
• Identifying and offboarding partners who aren’t meeting expectations.

But That’s Not All

Though most of their work involves managing the nuts and bolts of a partner program, partner operations also play a valuable role in something else: partner strategy.

A fantastic partner operations specialist not only observes everything that’s currently happening in the program, but zooms out to see where it’s headed in the next year or two — and whether that direction aligns with their company’s overall goals.

They bring fresh ideas to leadership about how things could be done differently or what they could try in the next month or quarter (and try to back it up with as much data as possible).

Do You Need a Partner Operations Team?

If you’ve got a small team or you’re thinking about launching a partner program, it’s easy to think you might not need a whole FTE dedicated to partner ops. But that would be a mistake.

“The truth,” Raegan says, “is that you always need to have someone thinking about this. You can’t execute well without partner ops. And if you can’t afford to hire a new person, you need someone on the team to very intentionally carve time out of their day to work on it.”

But that’s the hard part.

Partner managers are fully focused on recruiting new partners, nurturing relationships, and getting deals over the finish line. They don’t have time to pull reports, look for signs of partner churn, keep bad actors from joining the program, or monitor payouts — let alone consider where the ecosystem is headed and how to be a key player. Trying to spread those duties across one or two people’s already full plates is a recipe for disaster.

“I’d go so far as to say a program without partner ops is a partner program in name only,” Raegan emphasizes.

What to Do Before Hiring a Partner Ops Person

Though having partner ops in place from the get-go is ideal, the reality is that most companies end up bringing on a partner operations person when they’re already underwater. They’ve just purchased a PRM, they need someone to set it up, and they’ve been asked by leadership to prove the value of partnerships. So they rush to get someone on board.

“I see it over and over again,” says Aaron Howerton at Go Nimbly, “Companies hire reactively, not strategically. That ends up being rough on the new hire because they were brought on to fix one problem, which means they don’t actually have a job, they have a project.”

To avoid this, Aaron recommends:

Take a Hard Look at Your Partner Program As It Stands (Before Things Get Too Out of Control)

If you’re hiring for reseller or revenue-based programs, you’re going to need someone with different skills and talent than if your program is heavy on tech partners, which come with integrations and referrals.

“Write the bullets in your JD based on what to operationalize and the experience that person actually needs,” says Aaron. For example:

• If you need someone who can manage integrations → Look for a more technical background. These people need to be able to speak comfortably with both GTM and engineering peers (internally and externally).
• If you just need someone to keep the program running → Look for an organized project manager who knows their way around systems and can wrangle other teams. Previous work in the channel isn’t a must (that part can be taught).
• If you need someone who is comfortable advocating for and representing partnerships cross-functionally → Look for someone with more experience in the channel, who’s held more strategic revops positions before. If they won’t have a whole team behind them, they need to still be willing to delve into the details when needed.

Figure Out Who Partner Ops Reports To 

“This can make a big difference in what gets done and what doesn’t,” Aaron explains.

In his mind, the best-case scenario is partner ops reports to someone in the revops team, with a thick dotted line to partnerships — especially if the company isn’t fully bought into partnerships yet.

“The partner ops person is going to play a big role in selling the team internally. And if they report directly into partnerships, they don’t have as much leverage and can’t balance their work as much against company priorities.”

Create a Path to Leadership

Candidates want to see a clear way to level up in the company, so you need to think through that future for them.

“Though we’re seeing more and more leadership positions pop up, partner ops roles typically cap out at Director. Show candidates how they can get there, but also give them opportunities to pivot into other revops roles.”

A good way to ensure they have some support? Connect them to a community outside of work. “Operators are heads-down all the time. But they need professional investment in communities just like sales ops does, just like enablement does,” Aaron shares.

PartnerOps Partner, Aaron’s newsletter, job board, and Slack group, is a great place to start. Partnership Leaders has excellent resources as well.

4 Qualities of a Top-Notch Partner Ops Specialist

If you can make the case for a partner ops manager or team, it’s worth it. Here’s the catch — your leadership wants to see proof of their value. People who tend to succeed quickly:

1. Are systems thinkers

These people see the partner motion as a connected system: people process, data, and tools.

To that end, they know their way around a CRM, PRM, and account mapping tool. They’ve worked closely with system admins and may even make their own changes to settings, fields, workflows, and permissions on the fly so that everything is working smoothly.

If it’s not, they not only fix the problem (and any downstream impacts) as quickly as they can, but rebuild the process to prevent issues from cropping up again. Then, they document the change and train internal teams and partners on the new process.

For instance, Phil Portman at Textdrip, picked a partner operations person based on the fact that they had experience using CRM tools to track multi-touch partner engagement. “To me, that showed they understood processes, scale, and how to align multiple departments behind a single initiative. That mix of curiosity and tech comfort made a big difference.”

Someone who can take vague instructions and turn them into a repeatable process is an excellent candidate for partner ops. Per Aaron, previous product owners have those skills. 

“These people view systems and tools from a GTM perspective as a product. They create stories and requirements around a user experience, use their knowledge about the current architecture to turn that into solid processes, and have the project management skills to get it in production.”

2. Are numbers-driven

If partner ops folks are process first, they’re data second. And, if they’re doing it right, the data they collect and analyze informs better process.

Hiren Shah at Anstrex reveals, “When we were hiring, we looked for someone with an analytical skillset. They had to be able to take a mountain of spreadsheets and turn it into a partner engine. Bonus points if they had an obsessive inclination to process map.”

People who come from other numbers-heavy backgrounds — think analysts, deal desk, project managers — tend to do well in this role. They’ve had to build and present charts and graphs to all levels of the business, so they know what every audience is looking for and how to communicate it:

• For partners: clear deal reg, referral, lead, and training & certification dashboards
• For partner managers: high level view of partner performance and activity, flagging partners who are struggling
• For leadership: time to revenue, partner deal close rate (and cycle time), partner churn rate

3. Aren’t afraid to push back

Partnership operations is not for the weak. When you’re in charge of the data that impacts peoples’ paychecks, you’re in for some tough conversations. The best partner ops managers are confident in their data and their processes because they know them inside and out.

That makes them well-poised to:

• Manage internal politics. It’s much easier if you have the receipts in front of you.
• Hold the line on definitions (sourced vs. influenced deals, partner of record) so comp and partner credit stays clean.
• Ask “Why do we do it this way?” and get buy-in for a newly designed process.
• Push back on vanity metrics and replace them with KPIs tied directly to partner activity.
• Require proof-of-performance for MDF and claw back when it isn’t met.

It’s hard to tell if someone has this skill in an interview. Situational questions like, “Tell me about a time you said no,” can help you figure out if they have what it takes. Clear, specific answers are a strong signal.

4. Are cross-functional by default

These people understand how all the moving parts of the business work together and the role that partnership plays in the company. They know who is responsible for what and who to talk to to get things done. They also know how to play the game — and get the partner team the respect and insights they deserve.

As Raegan points out, “In most orgs, channel is not the only route to market. Partner operations should be looking for ways to get and give information to other teams.”

This skill doesn’t have to come from a channel background. David Hunt at Versys Media hired a partner ops specialist because of her track record of taming growth-stage chaos.

He explains, “What stood out about her was her experience solving operational problems combined with legit interpersonal tact. She could not only build out structured workflows, but also manage the complexity of different personalities across geos and verticals. That combination of operational discipline and high EQ was key.”

For Orest Chaykivskyy at Forbytes, an ideal partner ops specialist had a consulting background. “Our best hire came from consulting, not tech. She’s exceptional at building trust across stakeholders and keeping everyone moving in the same direction without needing constant escalation.”

How is Partner Ops Changing With AI

AI has made life for partner operations teams a whole lot easier. Now there are tools that can automatically:

• Surface underperforming partners based on specific engagement data (portal logins, training completion, deal reg velocity)
• Ping partner managers about a partner’s missed goals or deteriorating performance
• Spot overlapping registrations and suggest next steps to avoid channel conflict
• Offer more personalized onboarding and learning paths via chatbots
• Run A/B tests on co-branded landing pages

But, as Phil puts it so eloquently, “AI helps with the ‘what happened’ but not always the ‘what now’ and ‘how do we fix it.’ That’s still very much a human task.”

The partner operations teams that continue to do well in this environment will learn when and how to use AI to their advantage — and when to use their other soft skills instead. Raegan advises, “If you have access to a tool, try to optimize your daily tasks one by one, starting with the most monotonous ones. I’m looking forward to a time where AI can do things for partners, but that really depends a lot on your PRM data quality.”

Yes, Partner Ops is Still Relevant, But They Need Data to Do Their Jobs

Top-tier partner operations teams run on clean, connected data. And without a strong foundation to work from, they’re going to be nose deep in spreadsheets.

An enterprise-ready PRM ensures consistent, reliable data. Per Raegan, “You can blow a lot of things apart later by creating bad data from the start. Data governance is huge, so look for a PRM with some of it already baked in.”

Channeltivity, for example:

• Unifies training, channel marketing, and channel sales data, making it easy to pull and assess partner activity. It also allows you to enforce required fields and save specific views for quicker and more accurate reporting.
• Has partner-facing dashboards and email notifications so partners (and their partner managers) know exactly where they stand — whether an agreement needs to be signed or a deal registration is about to expire.
• Has native integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot for two-way sync of partners, leads, referrals, and opportunities, so channel account managers and AEs are always working from the same truth.

When partner ops teams have reliable data, they can do the work that AI can’t — pinpointing what to automate, foreseeing (and eliminating) friction, and anticipating where the program should go in the future.

Want to see how Channeltivity can equip your partner operations team to deliver the best partner experience?

Schedule a demo today.

The post Partner Operations: What Is It, and Is It Still Relevant in B2B? appeared first on Channeltivity.

Incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated records litter CRMs. And that has troubling ripple effects, from wasted marketing dollars to inaccurate pipeline forecasts to reps chasing dead leads.

But the damage doesn’t stop there.

For other tools that connect to CRMs, like partner relationship management tools (PRMs), bad data becomes an even bigger headache, fueling confusion among partner managers, frustrating partners, and making it nearly impossible to run an efficient partner program.

To understand more about this problem, we turned to our partner community. Below, we share their stories and practical tips for maintaining a tidy CRM (and PRM) over time. But first, we explore how CRMs can get so messy in the first place.

Why Does CRM Data Get Bad?

No one intends to fill their CRM with junk, but it happens to the best of us.

Here are the usual culprits:

You’re Lacking Process

When people are in a hurry (and even if they’re not), they tend to leave things out and make mistakes. Without clear standards in place, it’s easy for them to:

• Create leads without checking if the same one already exists.
• Submit opportunities without filling out important fields.
• Use an inconsistent naming convention, causing confusion and duplication.
• Sync accounts and contacts to your PRM — even if they’re not partner-related.
• Dump whole tradeshow lists into your CRM without understanding which leads were actually interested in your product, and which ones just wanted swag.

While these things may seem minor in the moment, they can cause major headaches for teams that rely on clean data to find partner co-selling opportunities, run efficient co-marketing campaigns, and manage partner relationships.

Nahuel Moreno, a Salesforce developer, founded a whole company, Deploforce, for this very reason. “I’ve seen how inconsistent data structures cascade into partnership disasters. One SaaS company I worked with had their partner data split across three different objects, with duplicate accounts, inconsistent naming conventions, and zero validation rules.”

That meant their partner managers were making decisions based on reports showing partners who didn’t actually exist. Meanwhile, real, high-value partners appeared as ‘inactive,’ and eventually left the program.

There’s Been Admin Turnover

When Salesforce or HubSpot admins leave, institutional knowledge often goes out the door with them. New admins that come in to replace them may not be aware of certain system gaps, let alone that there’s even a connection between your CRM and PRM.

Unknown errors can pile up, and the longer they sit there, the harder they are for you — and the new admin — to untangle.

There Are No Expiration Dates

Marketing teams are goaled based on the qualified leads they bring in. That makes sense: all their work is focused on getting those leads in the door.

That said, if a marketing lead has been lying dormant for over a year and a partner happens to re-engage them, it doesn’t make much sense for marketing to claim that they influenced any resulting deals.

After all, if it weren’t for the partner, that lead could have been sitting in Salesforce or HubSpot for who knows how long.

Brian Wichinski at Cloudian shares,“I’ve been in situations where marketing wants to collect as much data as possible, which is good, but most of the contacts and leads they’ve collected haven’t been doing anything for years. 

We’ll go to a partner event, log deals into Channeltivity, and realize there’s already a Salesforce record — it hadn’t been deleted after a full 12 months of no response.”

Some PRMs, like Channeltivity, catch these duplicates. But they can still be a pain to clear out of your CRM. And the more dupes you have in there, the bigger the clearing-out project becomes.

Why Bad CRM Data Hurts Your Partner Program

When sloppy, inaccurate data from your CRM spills over into your PRM, there’s a higher chance that you:

Lose Credibility With Partners

Nothing erodes a partner’s trust faster than when they find out you don’t know your own history with them.

Aamir Qutub at Enterprise Monkey shared that, back when he was at a different SaaS company, he and his team had lined up a meeting with what they thought was a new strategic partner — but they had pitched them six months earlier.

“Turns out, we had completely dropped the ball. They didn’t trust us enough to give us a second chance.”

Incorrect data about revenue-driving activities, like deal registrations or referrals, can harm your reputation, too. Not only does it make you look like you don’t have all your ducks in a row, it can also affect commission calculations and even spark channel conflict.

For Kent MacWilliam at VictorEric Design+Build, having a messy CRM meant every task became an ad hoc project, and important things — like recognizing and rewarding partners — slipped through the cracks. “Thinking back, this wasn’t fair at all to the partners because we didn’t distribute perks, especially discounts and reciprocal business, with much consideration.”

If you’re really invested in a partnership, promos and payouts are things you definitely don’t want to mess with.

Struggle to Motivate Partners

Bad data in your PRM makes it harder to show partners how much progress they’ve made toward your joint goals. And if they’re not quite where they need to be, inaccurate data is not what’s going to motivate them to do better.

Brian explains,“You want to show partners that you can keep them accountable for the revenue they’re driving. If you don’t have accurate data to show them, your asks fall flat.”

Reliable data is what gives you the leverage you need to have honest conversations, set realistic expectations, and keep partners engaged. Without it, partners are left guessing where they stand — or they check out altogether.

Geoff Tucker, founder of Data Ops Group, had a client who suffered significantly from inaccurate partner prioritization based on fundamentally flawed data in HubSpot: 

“I discovered they’d been undercounting contributions from key partners by nearly 40% due to data quality issues. They were on the verge of terminating relationships with some of their most valuable partners.”

Slow Your Team Down

Bad data doesn’t just threaten partner relationships; it can impact team budget and productivity, too. For example:

• Partner marketing teams might spend time and dollars getting in front of unqualified partners or prospects instead of spending that money on high-ROI campaigns.
• Partner team members might invite no-fit prospects to joint partner events, wasting space and budget on people who were never going to buy anyway.
• Partner managers may think a peer already has a solid relationship with a prospect, but it’s really just someone who attended one webinar (and left early). They introduce that cold lead to a partner — who quickly realizes the lead is not a fit at all. That partner probably won’t trust that PM to help them out again.
• Partner ops folks might track partner activity in Excel or Google Sheets because they don’t trust their own CRM or PRM dashboards. They could’ve been using that time to jazz up the Partner Portal or perfect a QBR deck.

Eventually, this can lead to smaller annual partner budgets, more scrutiny from leadership, and even team retention issues. 

How to Clean Up Your CRM Data

If your CRM is in rough shape, don’t panic: clean up is possible. In fact, there are many ways to go about it. Here are a few different strategies people in your shoes have used to get back on track:

Go Scorched Earth

If you really want to be sure you’re starting from a good foundation, you can start from scratch.

Delete all records from 5+ years ago. If those leads or opportunities are meant to come back, they will. With all that old data gone, you can refocus on the records that matter most right now and start thinking about how you want to restructure your CRM data moving forward.

Plus, your system will be running a lot faster without thousands of records bogging your CRM (and its integrations) down.

Put Your CRM on Pause

This one is also hard to do, logistically, but hitting pause on your CRM can give you breathing room to identify the root causes of data issues — and stop the band-aiding cycle.

Adrien Kallel at Remote People, for example, froze all data entry for a few weeks to triage duplicate records. “Sounds dramatic, but necessary. We ran a massive deduplication project using native Salesforce tools plus some custom scripts. It took about 3 weeks to merge 2,400 records.”

By stopping new data from flowing in, they could focus entirely on clean up — and figuring out how to prevent bad data from reappearing in the future. For them, this meant:

• Making certain fields required to avoid incomplete data
• Adding validation rules to flag errors before they get saved
• Creating proper lead routing workflows to make sure partner-sourced opportunities were routed to the right person

This approach may not work for larger companies with tons of people using your CRM and PRM every day. But you could try to do a smaller, shorter version of this with specific objects or record types.

Take a Data Archeology Approach

If a big bang-style clean up isn’t realistic, you might consider what Geoff calls “data archaeology,” which involves mapping every field and property to understand how information flows between systems now (and whether that should change in the future).

With that information on hand, you can start to clean up your CRM in waves.

“I’d tackle active partner relationships first, then historical data. I’d use a combination of HubSpot-native deduplication tools, custom workflows for data validation, and manual verification processes.”

From there, you can start to architect stricter data governance protocols. More on that next.

5 Tips For Keeping Your CRM Clean

A one-time clean up is the first step toward a healthier CRM, but keeping your CRM healthy is not a one-and-done exercise. As Brian puts it:

“Your CRM is like a garden. You have to weed it. Otherwise, those weeds will multiply. It’s something you have to constantly be aware of.”

Here are 5 ways to keep your CRM in check:

1. Governance From the Get-Go

Without rules, every person enters data in a different way. Developing standard operating procedures with the help of other teams can help you get off on the right foot post-clean up.

Aamir suggests making it a multi-team effort: “We set up a cross-functional‘data integrity squad’ with sales, partnerships, and IT. We introduced clear field validation and sunset policies for inactive entries.”

At Remote People, Adrien implemented a ‘two-person rule’ for bulk imports“one person uploads, and another reviews before it goes live.”

To keep all GTM teams accountable, try appointing one or two data stewards who build hygiene reports and review them at your weekly or monthly meetings.

2. Institute a Tiering Process

You don’t treat every lead or partner the same because they’re in your system. You pay special attention to the ones that are most likely to create value. And those are usually the ones that have recently expressed a genuine interest in your company or your product.

Per Brian, “I think we can all agree that requesting a demo or a meeting is more of a tier 1 action. That lead should go straight to a seller or reseller. But if a lead has been dormant for a year or more, ask yourself: How long do you want to track dead things?”

Tiering or prioritizing records (and deleting the ones that don’t matter after a certain point in time) helps you:

1. Focus time and resources on the highest-value contacts and partners.
2. Reduce noise in reporting and forecasting.
3. Avoid channel conflict over stale or dubious leads. Brian warns, “The situation you want to avoid is telling a partner that a deal is unregisterable because it was part of a conference list from 3 years ago. That’s the last time they’ll want to sell for you.”

To start, define what actions push a lead or partner into each tier (meeting booked, recent purchase, engagement within 90 days). Then align your data retention policies accordingly.

3. Lean Into Automation

Most CRM tools have built-in data cleaning workflows that can flag duplicate, missing, or incomplete records. PRMs like Channeltivity have them, too.

Make a point to use those features to the fullest extent so that at least the manual time you spend is actually focused on clean up, not just identifying problem areas.

And if you think you need to buy a third-party tool, make sure you know exactly what your biggest data quality issues are (duplicates, formatting, enrichment) so you’re spending money on something that’s truly a bang for your buck.

4. Set Up Recurring Audits

Even though tools can catch most issues for you, it’s important to do extra checks once in a while. Consider having each partner manager run through a checklist every month to:

• Verify all child records are in good shape.
• Confirm all the contacts are up to date.
• Determine whether partner account/organization and deal registration/opportunity statuses are syncing back and forth between the PRM and CRM appropriately.
• Partners haven’t flagged any incorrect or outdated information.

You could even all hop on a call to do it together. Or, to expedite the process, have them build and save reports in your CRM and PRM so that all they need to do is hit refresh and do a quick comparison.

5. Train New Hires

Even the best systems crumble if people don’t know how to use them properly. Make a point to walk them through all of your CRM and PRM best practices during their first few weeks on the job, so they get used to your process.

It’s a good idea to have a list of data standards and governance rules somewhere accessible, and have a process for updating everyone on system changes, not just new hires.

Need a PRM that integrates directly with Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics?

Look no further than Channeltivity. We’ve got seamless connections to all three. Set up a call to see just how easy setup can be.

The post The Dangers of Bad CRM Data appeared first on Channeltivity.

What are they using AI for? What AI tools do they use? Have their AI experiments moved the needle in a significant way?

We decided to find out.

Below, we unpack seven crowd-sourced use cases for AI in partner programs, with real-life anecdotes — straight from enterprise teams testing, iterating, and learning what works.

7 Ways to Use AI in Your Partner Program

1. Speed Up Recruiting

Source New Great-Fit Channel, Affiliate, and Referral Partners

Finding excellent partners to add to your roster is not easy, even if you’ve built out an ideal partner profile and know exactly what you want.

Building a partner recruiting list can involve anything from spending hours researching the partner programs of your current partners, talking to customers about their preferred solution providers — even scraping public data.

Outsourcing this time-consuming task to AI can make your partner team more efficient. Raviraj Hegde’s team at Donorbox created an internal AI workflow to assist with partner recruitment using a combination of GPT-4 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“We ask the AI to rate profiles for industry fit, historical SaaS partnerships, and overlapping customers. It eliminates noise and ranks partners on IPP fit and preparedness. This took days off of our outreach process.”

The outcome? A 40%+ increase in response rates.

Another option? Use a prebuilt tool like Clay to find accounts and contacts based on highly specific criteria, like company size, region, tech stack, role, and former workplace.

Surface Integration Partners

Pieter Wellens at Apicbase uses AI to automatically surface integration partners that would be most useful to their customers.

“We realized our customers were often requesting the same integrations over and over again, and our dev team was spending a lot of time evaluating feasibility. We work with POS systems, inventory tools, and delivery platforms, and instead of manually deciding which ones to partner with next, we use AI to analyze usage patterns and identify gaps where a new integration would bring the most impact.”

Running usage data and customer feature requests through an AI model gives Pieter’s team clearer signals about what integrations will bring real value. And it’s working.

“We’ve launched integrations 30% faster because we’re no longer guessing what to build; we have data to back every decision. Our partner satisfaction score improved by 18% over the last two quarters.”

2. Use AI to Organize and Keep Track of Your Partner Program

No matter whether you’re more junior or senior in your partnerships career, it can be tough to keep track of the partners on your roster.

Who should I check in with first? What conferences did they go to recently, and have they logged any deal registrations yet? What new partners still need to be vetted?

These questions take up a lot of mindspace. What if you could outsource them to AI?

Turns out, you can. Raegan Wilson, VP of Ecosystem Solutions & Innovation at Spur Reply, is doing exactly that, training tools like Microsoft Copilot on her client’s Portal data, and building AI agents that surface the most relevant data to each partner manager.

“There are just so many things a partner manager needs to think about every day.‘What deal registrations haven’t been updated in a month?’‘Which partners haven’t logged into the portal in 60 days?’‘What partner-led deals are coming up for renewal?’‘Which of my smaller partners should I pay attention to now because they could have huge potential?’

AI can not only find this information, but help partner managers prioritize it, turning it into more of a checklist than an overwhelming amount of work in their heads.”

Weaving AI into partner manager and other internal workflows first has helped her team work out any kinks before deploying AI in partner-facing parts of the portal.

“Using AI to streamline internal workflows is better because there’s not as much risk attached to it — you’re not going to show partners something they shouldn’t see. And users can help you refine it over time.”

3. As a Thought Partner

Mackenzie Wiley, former Channel Program Manager at Telestream, uses ChatGPT as a sounding board for new projects and campaigns she’s cooking up. 

She explains,“I like to ask ChatGPT about the type of content I want to create or ask it for ideas. I may not use its exact answers, but it saves me time and adds a different perspective.”

Having a second brain can be especially useful if you’re on a smaller team and your boss and colleagues don’t always have time for a brainstorming session.

Ask ChatGPT or Claude to role-play as your boss, sharing innovative ideas, pointing out potential obstacles, and challenging you to think about different angles for approaching a problem. You can even ask it to provide a plan for accomplishing your goal that you can tweak to your unique use case. 

4. To Find New Ways to Upsell (Or Cross-Sell)

Knowing what and how to upsell is an art and science. And, depending on how your partner program is set up, partners may not realize that an end customer would benefit from new features that were recently released or want certain add-ons because of their specific use case.

A recent GTM Partners newsletter (Who Owns AI in GTM?) highlighted that their clients use AI to guide upsell and cross-sell efforts.

“AI can suggest personalized upsell/cross-sell paths based on similar customer behavior, identify support trends that lead to expansion, and recommend new services or educational content proactively.”

Their clients use it for both:

• Personalized end customer journey mapping, boosting adoption, and revealing where partners can add value — if new use cases arise, goals have changed, the market is shifting, etc.
• Proactive success outreach triggers. AI can detect patterns in customer purchases, service tickets, and product usage, surfacing accounts that are ready for more, whether it’s an add-on product or service package.

5. Use AI to Accelerate Onboarding in Your Partner Program

In theory, the partner enablement journey you’ve developed works perfectly. If partners read and follow your directions, they know exactly what steps they need to take to understand your product, get certified, and start submitting Deal Registrations.

But ask yourself how often that really happens. If your program is like most, partners rarely follow your process 100% of the time.

That’s why Raegan’s team has used AI agents to build always-on, in-portal assistants to nudge partners in the right direction.

“It gives partners quick-start suggestions based on where the partner is(region) and their type when they log in. It can even proactively reach out and say,‘Hey, have you done this yet?’”

She’s seen that this kind of interactive guidance ends up leading to more partner engagement — a key metric for showing the value of the channel.

6. Offload Some Partner Support

Think about how many times partners reach out to your PMs and CAMs about: 

• Their program status
• The certifications they need to get
• The SPIFFs they qualify for
• Their marketing development fund max for the year

Now think about how much time you could save them by implementing an AI-powered chatbot that answers those questions in a few seconds. That’s a lot of time saved on unnecessary emails!

Even though all that information is probably already available in your Portal, partner users don’t always have the patience or know-how to find and comb through your business plans or figure out how to use your Portal reporting features. And, let’s face it, they probably deleted your emails about new promos coming down the pike.

Raegan’s team at Spur Reply is also using AI agents to build an ‘Ask a CAM’ assistant for one of her clients to alleviate this pain.

“That assistant lives in the Portal and knows who the partner is, where they’re located, and where they are in the program, then gives tailored answers to partner questions based on their profile.”

If you don’t have the resources to build a tool of this scope, you can start small.

For example, one of our Channeltivity customers is embedding a prebuilt chatbot into the Library, periodically feeding the bot File Name, Description, URL, CreatedDate, and ModifiedDate data so that partners can ask it to find a particular whitepaper, pricing sheet, or case study.

7. Draft Personalized Channel Marketing Campaigns

In our recent guide to channel marketing, Ana Beatriz Santos at Axur shared that she uses AI for personalization and marketing automation, adding in small touches to help outbound channel marketing campaigns better resonate with the audience they’re trying to target.

“All of our solutions at Axur are based on AI models, so we’re encouraged to lean on the AI solutions that are already integrated into our CRM and the rest of our tech stack. The suggestions it gives us save us a lot of time in campaign creation and execution.”

Raviraj uses AI for partner marketing efforts at Donorbox, too. “We use AI to craft customized webinar invitations, landing page descriptions, and other co-branded campaigns for individual partner verticals.”

The real value, he says, is that “AI learns to adjust tone and language in accordance with previous campaign performance,” ultimately leading to better webinar attendance, website engagement, and open and click-through rates.

A note here — that may be fairly obvious, but is good to keep in mind — is that the personalization power of your AI engine is completely dependent on:

1. The data you give it (more on that later),
2. The way you prompt it.

If you want it to emphasize specific features for a specific audience, let’s say, you have to tell it that upfront — otherwise, the model is just guessing (and we’ve all seen how wild hallucinations can get).

For AI to Work in Your Partner Program, You Need Partner Data

At Channeltivity, we’ve designed our Partner Portal to collect and manage all the data you need to feed, train, and deploy AI agents that drive true ROI for your program.

We collect:

• Partner enablement data, tracking everything from Training and Certification progress to how many times partners log into the Portal.
• Deal Registration submissions and approvals, plus supplemental data from syncing to your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot). Have crappy CRM data? We can help you with that, too.
• Lead Distribution data, to see which partners accepted and closed the Leads you sent them (and when).
• MDF data, to show which partners participate and what marketing activities reel in new deals.

Plus, we have our own analytics and reporting tools to help you monitor and clean data on the backend — before feeding it into your models. And we keep it secure. We undergo an annual SOC 2 Type II audit, comply with GDPR and CCPA, and our application is designed to help our customers implement data protection best practices themselves.

Ready to transform your enterprise partner program with AI?

Schedule a demo with Channeltivity to see how our PRM can empower your channel strategy.

The post How Are People Actually Using AI in Their Partner Programs? appeared first on Channeltivity.

“Why should I share deals with partners?”

“Can you explain what you do again?”

We can hear you grinding your teeth from here. 

Misconceptions about the channel are so ingrained that it’s really tough to convince your peers and senior leaders that partners can have a huge impact. Not only on revenue, but on your company’s brand presence, product roadmap, and expansion plans, too.

But — it’s not impossible.

We interviewed 6 experts who’ve been around the block a time or two to gather their best tips for getting partnerships the attention they deserve. Below, we bust the most common myths people have about the channel and share 6 strategies for overcoming them from seasoned partner leaders.

Common Misconceptions About the Value of the Channel (and Why They’re Wrong)

“They Don’t Lead to Revenue.”

If we take a step back and look at this misconception objectively, they sort of have a point. Partnerships is inherently slower than sales. It will take longer to start generating revenue from partnerships than it does selling direct.

The key is to be patient — an investment in partnerships is one that pays off in the long run.

Brandon Swain, Strategic Partnerships Development Manager at Tithe.ly, shares,“For sales, their default is ‘Always be closing.’ Partnerships is not about that. Not every call or lunch is a closing motion. It’s about building strong relationships that lead to bigger, better opportunities.”

If your company is new to partnerships and you’re standing up a program for the first time, you will encounter this misconception a LOT. And it’s going to be tough to prove that things are working before you win some deals. More on that below.

“They Aren’t Strategic.”

We know you’re thinking, “Au contraire.” And you’re right. As we’ve already established, good partnerships require time and effort to build. As such, partner managers carefully select which partners to prioritize — even if it may not be obvious to others.

Asif Mansoor, Cloud GTM Lead at Writer, points out: “When execs think about their TAM, they’re usually thinking about one big number, not about what makes up that big number.”

He continues, “In my experience, companies that get to $100M in ARR in a few years are the ones that understand that a chunk of their addressable market is really only accessible by partners, and they go out and find the people who can build out a strong channel.”

Besides reeling in new revenue, the best partners are skilled at upselling, making your product stickier, increasing your customer lifetime value, and making your entire go-to-market more efficient.

George Klippel, Director of NA Channel Sales, highlights: “Our partners bring localized trust and knowledge that our people just don’t have. They’re a force multiplier. They can scale our brand, help us enter new markets, and develop deeper customer relationships. It would cost us a fortune to replicate that.”

Steve Arlin, VP Global Technical Alliances at Superna, echoes that statement, underscoring the importance of partnerships for startups in particular. “The biggest risk to startups is poor hiring. The channel gives you the reach and scale you need. Leveraging partner sales teams gives you better coverage and reach into more customers and more geographies.”

How’s that for strategic?

“They Make Me Cede Control Over My Deals.”

To say salespeople are under a lot of stress to deliver is an understatement. Anything that threatens a deal is more than just annoying: it’s taking away their livelihood.

“Look, I used to work in sales, and my boss did not want to hear that a channel partner was involved in an opp,” Steve explains.“They wanted to know that I was owning every part of that deal, start to finish.”

But often, giving some control to partners is absolutely necessary to get deals across the finish line. Per Asif: “The truth is that a huge bank or healthcare company leader isn’t going to talk to your salesperson. They only procure software from a CDW or WWT, and they only do post-sales with an Accenture or a Deloitte. The only way you’re going to penetrate that account is through a partnership connection.”

“They Slow the Sales Cycle Down.”

If you’ve been in the partnerships world for a bit, it’s hard to believe that some people think the channel is a blocker to deals. But it’s really a mismatch of expectations. 

“Salespeople are coin-operated. They want as much margin as possible. If you can’t offer net neutrality, offer SPIFFs, or other incentives for working partner deals and try to highlight how much quicker deals get closed with a partner’s help,” says George.

“Your sales team needs to understand that channel partners aren’t just fulfillment mechanisms. They enable and accelerate the sales process — they don’t dilute it.”

6 Strategies to Highlight the Value of the Channel (and Partnerships in General)

Misconceptions don’t have to hold you back. Here are six strategies to elevate your channel and demonstrate the real value partnerships bring to your business.

1. Make Your Internal Process Seamless (and Known)

Without a solid process — and strong reasons — for engaging with the channel or other partners, salespeople simply won’t. Come to them with a well-thought-out plan for:

• How Deal Registrations, Referrals, and Lead Distribution will work. Are these flowing into and out of Salesforce or HubSpot? Who is responsible for what, and how will they be notified? Make sure to test all of this out in your Partner Portal to work out any kinks.
• How sales should engage with partners. If a Deal Reg comes in, will the partner want sales present in the first conversation or not? Are partners expecting to come up with a joint co-selling strategy with your sales team? Clear rules of engagement will help your partners and your sales team work well together.

As you start building this plan, try to anticipate your sales team’s reactions and questions. Often, this will cause you to think of things you hadn’t originally thought about and make your plan that much more thorough.

And, one more point here: be prepared to go through it more than once.

“Partnership leaders are constantly educating and re-educating. Sales teams have a lot on their plate. But if you continue to emphasize the value of the channel, explain how compensation is structured in detail, and get some wins under your belt, sales folks can become big believers,” says Stacy Desrosiers, VP of Business Development at Lewis Rhodes Labs.

2. Advertise the Value of the Channel to Other Teams

Partners are a never-ending source of information — about your product, your competition, and how people perceive your brand in the market. And that information can be extremely valuable to your colleagues in product, marketing, and customer success.

“There are so many things the channel can give outside of your direct sales force,” Stacy says. They have a better pulse on larger market dynamics, customer requirements, intel on pricing and licensing — they just have a much broader view.”

Perhaps even more importantly, partner feedback contextualizes GTM and engineering team value. Steve highlights:

“Often, there’s a disconnect between the folks who build and market the software and the people who use it. Commentary from channel partners(who are gathering feedback from real users) shows the real-world application of and appreciation for that work. Hearing about the wins can be really motivating for your peers.”

So, how do you share that knowledge and reinforcement? There are a couple of ways to go about it.

Form a Partner Advisory Council

Inviting sales, product, marketing, and strategy teams to PAC roundtables gives people a chance to ask deeper questions of channel partners. Plus, it simultaneously elevates your partners’ role in hitting company objectives.

Host Coffee Chats

“Have as many meetings as you can with other managers of other departments. If you’re new, start by sharing a little about your vision for the program and how you think partners can help their team,” Brandon recommends.

“But mostly, be listening. Ask what you can do to make their lives easier. Over time, you can make it more of a structured agenda based on those needs and interests.”

For example, Brandon was chatting with a partner who said they were sunsetting a particular product — one he’d just heard the product team say they were struggling to build.

“I told our internal teams about that partner’s offering and introduced them to the partner’s leadership team. We ended up inheriting that website product and its 1,200 users as a result of the partnership. The conversations I’d had helped me connect the dots.”

3. Deploy an Internal Sales Strategy

If you’ve got supportive leaders, that’s great, but you’re still going to have some doubters. Brandon explains:

“You’ve got to buddy up to the power players and build internal partnerships with them. A good way to do that is to highlight wins that matter to them. For example, when I moved into partnerships, I noticed our CX team had a problem with churn. As our program grew, I made sure to stress how partner-sourced deals were more likely to get upgraded to a higher subscription, stay longer, and process more donations through the platform.”

Stacy tends to agree.

“When you join an org, your first job is to figure out what the big problems are. Maybe your comp plans are bad, or marketing is not supporting the channel. Involve other teams as much as you can in solving those problems. That way, as you tick down those issues, people will feel like they’ve had a hand in your success.”

4. Launch Your Own Promotion Strategy, Too

To really hammer home the value of partnerships, you need to keep them top of mind — internally and externally. Showcasing all of your and your partners’ work builds momentum and helps people understand the channel’s value.

Some ideas from our interviewees include:

• Setting up a partner Slack or Teams channel where you can share partner feedback, joint case studies or blog posts, highlight new integration builds, spotlight partners expanding into new geographies, and request input from other teams.
• Asking for a spot at All Hands meetings once in a while. This is an excellent opportunity to highlight deal and partner recruitment wins across the company. Steve suggests inviting partners to share feedback or a win story live to add more color.
• Creating a partner newsletter. Mari Jackson, CMO at Global Telecom Solutions, helps her channel team send a monthly newsletter that is internal and partner-facing. “We also publicize recent wins and new channel initiatives through social media and our Channeltivity Portal. We want to show that we are heavily invested in our partner community and their growth and development.”
  • Another bonus of sending out a newsletter? It motivates partners who haven’t closed deals yet. “At first, I was afraid that sharing executive summaries of our partner wins would result in channel backlash,” says George. “But instead of getting jealous, our partners told me how excited they were to see new ways of selling and implementing our technology.”
• Host industry impact awards. Get everyone in your company involved in nominating and selecting partners to recognize. Not only does it celebrate your best partners, it also brings attention to your brand and your program. “We’re thinking of instituting a President’s Club for partners who hit our highest revenue targets and sending them on an amazing outing or trip. It gets our program and our business more attention,” Steve mentions.

That being said, be careful not to saturate public channels too much. Stacy warns, “Finding different ways to showcase the value of the channel is fantastic, just don’t do it to the point where people say,‘Oh, here goes the channel again…’ The point is to engage, surprise, and impress them.”

5. Lead with Numbers

One of the best ways to win over skeptics? Hit them with cold, hard numbers. 

Asif puts it, “Revenue is how we in partnerships earn the right to exist.” The more partner-led, partner-sourced, or partner-influenced deals that come across the finish line each quarter, the more respect you’ll get.“In most cases, you couldn’t have closed without them, which shows that a partner’s clout, an intro to a specific contact, or much-needed intel can make a huge difference in winning.”

Of course, revenue isn’t the only thing that matters. If you’ve just launched a partner program, you won’t have revenue to report for a while. And even if you are able to put numbers on the board, it’s not necessarily evidence that you’ve got a sustainable partner strategy.

“Think beyond revenue to show total health of your channel as well,” Stacy offers. “For example, how many partners have more than one rep generating revenue? How many deal regs are actually qualified? How many partners are going through training and not producing revenue?”

George likes to use the number of leads partners are sending him and his team as a benchmark for channel maturity.

“We’re giving out leads to partners all the time, but at a certain point, they should also be fishing on their own. I know I’ve been successful in training and onboarding if we’re getting closer to a 50/50 outbound-inbound split.”

Creating dashboards in your Partner Portal can help you identify what’s working and what’s not, pinpoint the partners who are actually investing in and capitalizing on your program, and help you identify opportunities for improving your program over time.

Want more inspiration for your reporting? Read Partner Analytics: What It Is and How to Do It

6. Align Incentives

Ideally, though it’s not always possible, a net-neutrality model can work wonders for boosting sales engagement.

“Everyone is coin-operated. They want as much margin as possible. If you can’t offer net neutrality, offer SPIFFs for working partner deals and try to highlight how much quicker deals get closed with a partner’s help,” says George.

Clear rules of engagement will also help your partners and your sales team work well together. Make sure you’re explicitly clear in how reps’ commissions on partner-related deals will work and that everything is mapped properly in your CRM.

Think you might hit some roadblocks? Read our Guide to Managing Channel Conflict.

Bonus: Do Your Due Diligence Before Accepting a New Role

There will still be some non-believers — even if you follow these strategies to a tee. Stacy recommends trying to get a pulse on leaders’ views on the channel (as best you can) before joining a new company.

“Personally, I try not to join organizations whose execs don’t believe in the value of the channel. It’s different if the sales team is apprehensive — you can fix that by getting some wins under your belt. With skeptical leadership, I know I’m just constantly going to be hitting a wall.”

Hungry for more ways to show the value of the channel? Get advice on building a career in partnerships.

Or, see how you can get your partner data organized with Channeltivity. Schedule a demo today.

The post How to Make Sure Internal Folks Understand the Value of the Channel appeared first on Channeltivity.

Because each type of channel partner has a unique audience. To capture as many eyeballs as possible, partners need to cut through the noise — and sporadic email blasts, one-off webinars, boring one sheets, and recycled slides aren’t going to do the trick.

If partners aren’t jazzed by the marketing assets and campaigns you’re putting forward, prospects won’t be either.

To infuse some excitement into your channel marketing and help you think outside the box, we’ve compiled a list of things to consider when putting together a new campaign, with four excellent examples as inspiration.

But before we dive into those, let’s refresh your definition of channel marketing.

What is a Channel Marketing Campaign?

A channel marketing campaign promotes a vendor’s products or services through resellers, distributors, tech partners, or affiliates. But just because partners are the ones executing a marketing campaign doesn’t mean the vendor isn’t heavily involved in planning, setup, and measurement.

As you can imagine, most vendors want some (if not all) control over their messaging and positioning.

Without structured campaigns, partners can communicate the value of the vendor’s product in whatever way they see fit — even if it doesn’t align with the vendor’s style and tone. For channel marketing campaigns to work, both parties have to dedicate time and effort to understanding the kinds of prospects they’re targeting and telling a compelling story in a unique way.

What Should You Think About When Creating a Channel Marketing Campaign?

The most memorable channel marketing campaigns aren’t launched overnight. As you start to build out your channel partner marketing function, prioritize:

Giving Partners the Resources They Need

Yes, your partners will lean on you for specific assets and campaign guidance. But even the best marketing in the world can’t close a deal. At the end of the day, partners need to be able to tailor your messaging to the needs of specific prospects in specific verticals. And they can’t do that without top-notch enablement.

Interactive product demos, certification programs, and pre-built sales collateral ensure that partners can confidently sell and support your offering.

Want more details? Read What is Partner Enablement and How to Do It Well.

Building a Solid Foundation

If you invest time and money into your partners, they’ll return the favor. Be strategic with the partners you choose to pour your energy into — make sure they’re the ones who are committed to making channel marketing a priority, and reward the ones who follow through.

Going Beyond Traditional Campaigns

Your channel can help your brand stand out. Why not capitalize on that as much as you can? Brainstorming one or two campaigns people can’t stop talking about will have a much bigger impact on your channel revenue than running the same plays everyone else is.

Want an easy way to come up with new ideas? Try using AI to revamp your channel marketing.

Tapping Into the Larger Ecosystem

Channel marketing campaigns don’t have to be limited to one vendor and one partner. If you’ve already run successful channel marketing campaigns with one partner, why not find a way to add another that is just as committed to a joint channel marketing strategy and can get your product or service in front of more prospects?

*Helpful Tip*

In a recent MKT1 newsletter (by ex-B2B marketer Emily Kramer), she points out that “list sharing isn’t that much of a value add anymore.”

With the proliferation of data enrichment and marketing intelligence tools, it’s not like companies are struggling to get contact information. And most partners are already using account overlap tools like Crossbeam.

“So if you are doing[joint marketing] just for the list share, check to make sure it helps you in another area too,” Emily says.“If you can work together and increase value for everyone involved, you can grow super fast!”

4 Real Examples of B2B Partner & Channel Marketing Campaigns

To get your creative juices flowing, we found four examples of unique campaigns we’ve seen in the wild, including:

1. An App Directory That Boosts Vendor and Partner SEO

Company: Zapier

Zapier has a wildly popular website and blog. On Ahref’s web authority checker, it’s got a domain rating of 91, with 13 million (you read that right) backlinks. Turns out, technology partners have played a key role in scaling their online traffic.

Like most B2B SaaS companies, they’ve got a landing page for each of their integrations in an app directory:

But unlike other B2B sites, each of those landing pages links out to myriad other pages — one for every other app customers can connect it to.

For example, if you click on the Slack integration, you can start connecting Zapier and Slack for free with my email or Google account, or you can choose to pair it with one of 30+ other apps, like Notion, Jira, Pandadoc, or Airtable:

If you click on one of these pages, you’ll come across a wealth of pre-built templates, each with its own details page that explains exactly how the workflow works — and that is littered with links to each partner’s website, other parts of the Zapier site, and CTA buttons.

Creating all these pages was (and we’re sure still is) a major project. But think about how many times these links have been shared by reps at Notion, Typeform, or Asana? Referenced in guest blog posts? Or posted on LinkedIn?

Beyond garnering web traffic, each of these pages is super useful, enticing potential customers to start a free trial — with a very sticky product.

2. A Social Media Launch (and Template) to Promote a New Integration

Company: There are three involved! Navattic, Asset Mule, and DemoDash

Navattic, an interactive demo software, and Asset Mule, a web-based sales assets tool, recently partnered and built an integration. To generate hype for the integration’s launch and showcase the value of the partnership, they teamed up with DemoDash, an agency that helps marketing teams build interactive demos.

The two founders of DemoDash already have a big presence on LinkedIn. And most of their audience already has Navattic or Asset Mule — making them the ideal people to publicize the new integration.

So, that’s exactly what they did. In the LinkedIn post below, one of the co-founders, Jason Oakley, explains what the Navattic-Asset Mule integration does. But, more importantly, he shares a handy template DemoDash created to help sales reps create their own demo centers, personalized to each prospect.

If a customer already has both tools, this template incentivizes them to try out the template and boost overall adoption. If a customer doesn’t have either tool, they can watch the video to see the value of the Navattic-Asset Mule partnership in action — which may push them to contact sales or sign up for a free trial of one of the tools.

Other Navattic and Asset Mule advisors chimed in on LinkedIn, too. Sydney Lawson at Rally, for example, shared her firsthand experience as an interactive demo creator and why the integration would be valuable to someone like her (Navattic and Asset Mule’s ideal customer):

This series of posts from DemoDash and other influencer partners didn’t just generate clicks but drove meaningful conversations around the power of hands-on experiences in SaaS sales, leading to more brand awareness for both Navattic and Asset Mule.

3. Community Thought Leadership For Vendor Brand Awareness

Company: Hire Developer Biz

Hire Developers Biz needed more leads, so they dug into their existing pipeline to see where the best ones were coming from. Per Ihor Shulezhko, their CMO, “We noticed they were coming from personal recommendations in Slack groups and niche newsletters — not from big ad campaigns.”

In order to build awareness and bring in leads from founders who were already looking for talent (but didn’t know of Hire Developer Biz), Ihor and his team reached out to a few smaller sites to see if they’d be willing to partner.

“We created short hiring tips, free templates, and practical checklists they could share directly with their audiences and then encouraged them to add their own personal recommendation.”

The strategy paid off. Though they didn’t see a spike in traffic to the company’s website, the leads that came in from those partners were “way warmer,” and the conversion rate was over 30% — much higher than what Ihor and his team typically see from regular paid campaigns.

In a world flooded with ads, sometimes the best approach is to stop marketing and start educating. “Having partners share useful content, instead of just pitching our services, made a huge difference,” Ihor says. 

4. A Unique Partner + Prospect Event to Generate Buzz

Company: Chili Piper

Sending channel partners to events or trade shows can be a good way to get your product in front of a new segment of people. But what if you hosted an event yourself and strategically invited tech partners, implementation partners, and prospects?

That’s exactly what Chili Piper did to stand out from the B2B SaaS crowd.

Chilipalooza, held earlier this year, was an invite-only experience, capped at just 150 people. Unlike other industry conferences, there were no booths, no pitches, and no keynotes. “Just cross-departmental roundtable discussions based on topics you pick and community-building.”

This unique, intimate event gave partners and prospects more time to mingle and have richer conversations. Corrina Owens summed it up best in her recap post:

Even if it didn’t lead to an immediate influx of leads, the event was memorable, and people built genuine relationships they could potentially tap into down the line. Plus, it got a lot of organic social engagement — attendees shared their experiences widely on LinkedIn, reinforcing the Chili Piper brand as not just a software provider but a community hub.

Turn Insights Into Impact

Creativity is one of the most important things when it comes to channel marketing. But don’t forget to tap into your analytical side, too — looking at your data during and post-campaign is almost as important as the idea for your campaign itself.

Say something goes viral, but no leads come from it. You may not want to sink time and money into a similar campaign down the line, right? Knowing exactly what kinds of channel marketing activities drive real revenue can reveal how to refine your list of partners, optimize your budget, and improve your channel sales over time. 

That said, trying to pull data from multiple tools and pivot your way into meaningful numbers can be a chore. A centralized partner platform like Channeltivity can help you:

• Identify which marketing development-funded activities led to Deal Registrations
• Determine which collateral gets co-branded the most, fueling ideas for campaigns around those specific topics or assets
• See which library materials and training courses get the most interaction, cluing you into the parts of your product that resonate most with partners (and likely their customers)
• Set channel marketing campaign goals with your partners in a business plan that both of you can access at any time

Besides running customized reports in Channeltivity, you can sync partner data to your CRM for more advanced analytics.

Ready to see it in action? Book a demo today to see how our portal can elevate your channel marketing — and your overall partner program.

The post 4 Real Examples of Partner + Channel Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Channeltivity.

So, what do you track?

And once you know what to track, how do you build a reporting process you don’t dread completing every month or every quarter?

Keep reading to learn what partner analytics is, how to apply it in your program, and some best practices to adopt along the way.

What Is Partner Analytics?

Partner analytics takes a magnifying glass to your program, highlighting what channel, reseller, referral, or affiliate relationships are contributing to your overall business growth (or not).

You could measure partner contribution in terms of closed deals or referrals, but that may not paint the whole picture.

Partners can amplify your growth in myriad ways, from opening doors to new geos to improving customer retention through smooth implementations to boosting brand awareness. And when measuring performance, those metrics need to be taken into account as well.

Importantly, though, partners can’t do any of those things if:

• They don’t see value in your program
• They don’t know how to sell or launch your solution
• They don’t know where to go to get marketing materials

The best way to know whether they’re properly enabled and incentivized is to measure engagement in every aspect of your program. If partners aren’t actively participating the way you want them to — say, with regard to training — you should consider making some tweaks.

Where to Focus Your Partner Analytics

Monitoring highs and lows on a regular basis shows you where your program may be lacking and how to make it incrementally better over time. A robust partner analytics function pays special attention to:

Deal Registrations in Partner Analytics

When you think of partner reporting, the first place your mind likely goes is Deal Registration. After all, Deals are the way that partners directly drive revenue. To nip any problems with Deal Registration in the bud, keep a close eye on:

The number of Deal Registrations you get (# Deal Registrations)

If you notice that some types of partners or partners in a certain region are struggling to bring in new business, that could be an indicator that they need more enablement or your product or solution isn’t suited to their offering or geo.

How Often Deal Registrations Are Approved (% Approved Deal Registrations)

If your approval rate is low overall, it could be that you’re not communicating your ICP or your lead qualifications clearly enough.

How Often Deal Registrations Close (% Deal Registration Close Rate)

Sometimes partners have no trouble attracting leads but struggle to close them. If you find that pattern in your data early, you can pitch a more hands-on co-selling motion to ensure any new deal registrations that come in make their way across the finish line.

How Large Your Closed-Won Deal Registrations Are ($ Avg Closed Deal Registration Size)

If your partners are closing deals, but not enough to meet your company quota, you may need to institute a minimum deal size requirement, particularly if you typically sell to the enterprise. Closing small deals may be helpful in the short term. But selling smaller packages or selling into smaller companies can cause retention problems down the line.

A lower number of deal registrations overall may be because you’re making the process too onerous for partners. David Isola, Previous Director of Customer Engagement at Black Box, explains:

“We had a very antiquated deal reg process where we’d send PDFs back and forth via email. There was a lot of human interaction that didn’t need to be there, and so I sought a solution.

We used Channeltivity to streamline our deal registration process in a partner-facing, cloud-based portal. Just a few months after making the switch to an easier process, we increased our revenue by 10x.”

But that wasn’t the only benefit he got from digitizing the process. Requiring resellers, VARs, and channel partners to fill in more information about who they were selling to gave his team more insight into how they could better market to and serve their customers.

“Before, we could never really reach our end users. But now, we ask for more account and contact information in the deal reg process which not only puts us in a better position to communicate with partners but to communicate with our customers as well.”

Referrals (if applicable) in Partner Analytics

Not all programs offer compensation for partner referrals — especially in addition to Deal Registration. But if they are a part of your program, you’ll want to observe trends here, too. Just adjust the Deal Registration metrics to Referrals:

• # Referrals
• % Referral Close Rate
• $ Avg Closed Referral Deal Size

Segment by partner type, partner region, and then by individual partner to see if you can spot any interesting tendencies or gaps that need to be addressed. For example, maybe your commission rate for referrals is significantly lower than your competitors. That could lead to a lower number of submitted Referrals overall.

Lead Distributions in Partner Analytics

As we stated up top, partners won’t participate in a program that they don’t see value from. And if the Leads you’re passing their way aren’t up to snuff, they’re simply not going to act on them — and may even write off your program altogether.

To determine whether your Lead Distribution is working (and what you can do to fix it if it’s not), keep tabs on:

• How many Leads partners convert to real opportunities (% Leads converted). What do these Leads have in common? How can you send more of these to your partners?

• How long it takes for partners to accept Leads (Avg time in days). If it’s getting longer and longer, maybe partners perceive the quality of your Leads to be worse and worse. Or maybe those Leads are getting buried in emails. If that’s the case, you need a more straightforward, transparent way to share them with partners.

Marketing in Partner Analytics

Partners are an excellent way to get the word out about your products and services to new and existing audiences you want to reach. Motivating partners to spread the word can come in many forms — one of them is marketing development funds.

Each quarter or month, vendors allocate a portion of their budget to partner-led events and campaigns designed to reel in new customers. 

Besides tracking how many MDF requests are logged every month or every quarter (and by which partners), you’ll want to know if those strategies are working.

• If it’s an online campaign, what is the open rate?
• What about the click-through rate?
• Did it perform better or worse than previous campaigns?

If it was an event:

• How many people showed up?
• How many turned into leads?
• How many of those leads turned into real opportunities?

Helpful hint: Look for a PRM that allows you to track Deal Registrations that result from MDF activity.

Training & Certification in Partner Analytics

Training and certification programs not only enhance partner competence but also strengthen commitment to your brand. Vendors that invest in comprehensive training programs often see higher partner engagement, increased deal registrations, and better sales outcomes.

To get a sense of how your training program is running, stay on top of:

• Training completion rate (% Courses Completed/Total Attempts). Are there Courses that partners often start but never finish? What do you think is making them stuck, and how can you change that?

• Certification pass rate (% Pass/Total Attempts). Which quiz questions do most people get wrong? Can you adjust the phrasing? Maybe they need more Lessons catered to that product use case, feature, or value prop.

• Shares on social media (% Certifications Shared). Every time a partner posts about your certification on LinkedIn or adds it to their profile, your company gets a visibility boost. If you’re not seeing partners do this, it might be because they don’t know they can or forgot they could. Simple reminders can go a long way.

General Partner Activity in Partner Analytics

If partners aren’t engaging, you want to know that right away. If you have a partner portal, it’s easy to track logins, but that doesn’t tell you much about their experience with your program.

Dive a little bit deeper:

• If you send a partner newsletter, what are the open and click-through rates?
• If you have a Partner Resource Library, how many downloads is each piece getting?
• If you offer Co-Branded Collateral, are partners generating any? What assets do they co-brand most?

David notes,“Seeing what content our partners are pulling down from the Library and what Co-Branded Collateral they’re making tells us a lot about how effective our materials are, what industries might be most popular, and the types of content we don’t need to spend more time on since partners aren’t using it.”

He’s not the only one that’s found success in tracking detailed portal activity. When the team at Brother started looking more closely at their partner analytics — and exposing KPIs to their partners, they saw “double-digit sales growth in both gold and silver tiers.”

3 Best Practices For Nailing Your Partner Analytics

1. Establish a Reporting Cadence

The first step in making partner analytics a priority is to make it a habit.

Partner Analytics For Smaller Or Newly Launched Programs

Checking on partner program KPIs more regularly, like every few weeks or every month, makes it easier for you to:

• Find new opportunities
• Change parts of your program accordingly
• Measure that change right away

There are ways to speed up this process so it’s not adding too much more to your plate (more on that next). But if weekly reporting becomes too much of a hassle, you can always slow your cadence down.

Partner Analytics For Larger Or More Mature Programs

Programs that have a high volume of partners and have been around a long time don’t tend to make changes to their programs that often. Changes can confuse partners, and there may be a lot of associated updates — to their website, tiering structure, collateral, and requirements.

If you’re in that boat, it makes sense to open your aperture a bit and only run reports every quarter. Ideally, you’d pull them before your internal or external QBRs, so you have some time to pinpoint any major issues and come into your meetings having brainstormed ways to effect future change. 

2. Create Report Templates

If you have to build the same dashboard over and over, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Your partner analytics could go way faster (and be more accurate!) if you build and save custom reports.

If You’re Using Spreadsheets

Make a cover tab with all of your higher-level formulas, and have it pull data from other hidden tabs. Every time you need to crunch your numbers, make a copy of your existing sheet and replace the old data in the hidden tabs with fresh numbers. The cover tab will automatically repopulate.

If You’re Using a PRM

Set up reports for each module, and then use built-in pivot tables, map views, filters, and time charts to surface the data you want to see. Once it’s in the format you want, save your view so you can refresh the data and pull it in the exact same way each time.

3. Centralize Your Data In a PRM

At a certain point, trying to juggle data from your CRM, email, Slack, and random spreadsheets becomes untenable. Fragmentation leads to inefficiencies, reporting delays, and a lack of clarity on partner performance.

A partner relationship management platform (PRM) automatically tracks what activity is happening and when. Consolidating all of your relevant partner data and connecting it directly to data in Salesforce or HubSpot creates a single source of truth that improves visibility and decision-making.

Many PRMs come with native partner analytics functionality that makes it easy for admins to customize reports, save them, and run them whenever you need up-to-date insights to show the value of your program. The best ones make that data available for partners to see as well, showing them their progress and payouts over time.

Don’t Have a PRM Yet?

Have a PRM, but it doesn’t have the reporting capabilities you need?

Give Channeltivity a look. Channeltivity’s partner analytics features offer visibility into every aspect of your channel program — whether you are planning to report solely from within Channeltivity or push Channeltivity data to and from a CRM like Zoho, Dynamics, Salesforce, or HubSpot.

Fully customize activity reports for any module, save common views to share information with your team, and export partner program data whenever you need to. Per David:

“The control you have over Channeltivity’s back-end and its ease of use is what really stands out about the tool. I like the interface and the way I can make changes and build out our modules and reporting in real time. It’s very intuitive.”

Want to see it for yourself? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today.

Or, if you’re not ready, download our Partner Program KPIs list along with our other Channel University materials here.

The post Partner Analytics: What It Is and How to Do It appeared first on Channeltivity.