How to create a channel partner strategy for your small business

If you’re a small business that’s looking to grow, the right channel partner strategy will help your business acquire more partners and create new revenue streams.

In this article, you’ll learn how to find new partners and discover eight strategies you can use to improve your partnership marketing.

You’ll also see how to use the right management software to overcome common challenges and scale your partnerships.

Key takeaways from channel partner strategy

• A channel partner strategy helps you build relationships with partners so that they become a reliable revenue source.

• Partnerships sometimes run into challenges if one partner is acquired or if the parties fail to align on co-selling efforts.

• To measure the success of your partnerships, develop a system to attribute revenue to each partner and track key metrics like cost per lead.

• With Pipedrive, you can create a strategic overview of all your partnerships and organize them more effectively – sign up for Pipedrive’s 14-day free trial.

What is a channel partner strategy and why do you need one?

A channel partner strategy is a method for growing efficiently or accessing new markets through partners with aligned business goals.

Since channel partnerships rely on shared audiences and mutual value, they often outperform conventional marketing strategies.

The following table shows why implementing partnership marketing is more effective than traditional marketing methods:

To be clear, it’s not that traditional marketing is all bad. It just takes a long time to get off the ground compared with a partnership marketing strategy.

To maximize the benefits of channel partnerships, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy in place

8 strategies you can use in your partnership marketing

Here are eight strategies you can use to level up your partnership marketing, each with an actionable case study.

1. Compile a list of target partners

If you’re creating a go-to-market strategy (GTM) for the first time, the simplest way to find the right partners is to ask yourself:

For example, if you sell project management software aimed at coaches, you could partner with:

• An accounting firm that serves coaches

• A quarterly magazine that’s popular with coaches

• An online forum where coaches go for support with their businesses

• YouTubers who create content about how to become a coach

Your first partners will probably come from your existing network. To branch out, consider the various partner categories that exist for your business. In the example above, the categories would be:

• Service providers

• Magazines

• Support groups

• Influencers

Once you have 10 or more types of partners, start looking for individual partners within those categories.

Create a database of at least 100 potential partners structured by category and assign each partner a priority score.

Work through your database, starting with the highest-priority leads, then reach out to each one of them. Email is the best way to do this, but you can also contact them on social media or call them directly.

When reaching out to leads, keep your initial message brief. Don’t pitch any sort of financial relationship until you’ve gotten to know them first.

In your outreach, be clear, direct and straightforward – here’s an example:

If you don’t hear back after one message, follow up at least once before giving up.

If the partner responds favorably, remember to stay in regular communication once you’ve started the partnership.

2. Build relationships with resellers that add extra value

When looking for partners that sell your product, consider resellers that add extra value, such as onboarding or training.

Pipedrive does this with its solution provider partnership.

In exchange for partners reselling Pipedrive, Pipedrive provides:

• Tiered commission levels

• Marketing development funds (MDF)

• Discounted licenses to companies that sell Pipedrive en masse

• Free marketing on Pipedrive’s solution partner marketplace

To ensure partnerships are successful, Pipedrive goes out of its way to make reselling as easy as possible.

Partners gain access to channel sales and marketing managers, as well as comprehensive onboarding and training.

They can manage the partner relationship on a partner portal, which includes analytics tools to track and optimize performance.

Pipedrive invites its top partners to events where they can network with other partners and senior Pipedrive leadership.

One such event is the Annual Partner Awards, where partners are recognized for their achievements.

In addition to nurturing its own partner network, Pipedrive also participates in networks established by other leading SaaS businesses, such as Asana.

3. Make financials transparent

When creating marketing collateral to attract new partners, be completely transparent about how much partners can expect to earn from working with you.

An example of a company that does this is Oyster, a payroll tool that operates a successful affiliate program.

Its channel partner program offers 10% revenue share for referrals, with a $250 bonus for the first referral and a $500 bonus for the second one.

Part of the program’s success is down to Oyster’s transparency regarding the commission structure. For example, potential partners can access a calculator showcasing their possible earnings:

To facilitate referrals, Oyster provides affiliates with a link they can share with their network. The link contains a custom landing page that allows Oyster to attribute referral revenue to the correct partner.

Referral partners have access to an affiliate manager to assist them with troubleshooting. Oyster also sends out a monthly newsletter with best practices for partners.

These sales strategies resulted in Oyster’s affiliate program growing by 500% in just two years.

4. Set up integrations with tools your ICP already uses

If you have a SaaS company, one of the best ways to build partner relationships is to develop integrations to the tools your customers are already using.

For example, ClickUp has a network of multiple tools that sell to the same customer base, enabling all the tools to co-market to each other’s users.

It created this network by building integrations with tools that its customers were already using, such as Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Once a partner integration became established, ClickUp collaborated with that partner on a co-branded launch and subsequent promotions.

Thanks to the size of both ClickUp and its partners, these co-marketing events have generated millions of impressions for both sides.

Affiliates receive repeat commissions for every sale, which incentivizes them to keep pushing traffic to the ClickUp integration page on their site.

This channel strategy worked particularly well for ClickUp because it positions itself as “one app to do it all”. Integrating with other leading apps so users can manage all their work in one place feels very on-brand.

5. Create a scalable partner ecosystem

The more partners you have, the easier it should become to acquire new partners and scale.

An example of a company that understands this principle is Snowflake, a cloud-based data storage company that uses partnerships to drive its product marketing.

The company invited other large businesses, including Foursquare and ZoomInfo, to share their data on Snowflake’s Data Marketplace.

This made the data on Data Marketplace more valuable, which in turn attracted more partners to add their data to the marketplace.

To make partner data easier to use, Snowflake introduced a try-before-you-buy system. This setup lets users test sample data and check how it combines with their existing data.

Retailers such as Albertsons Companies use real-time data from the marketplace to personalize customer experiences and share store-level insights with partners selling consumer goods.

As a result of these initiatives, listings on the marketplace grew more than fivefold (from 160) since 2021. There are now over 820 data providers contributing data that Snowflake users can plug into their analytics.

6. De-risk the partnership before you scale it

Before growing a partnership, ensure you’ve eliminated any risks to you and the partner.

Here are some risks partners may face when they start co-marketing and co-selling.

Unpredictable revenue from consumption-based models

When partner revenue depends on how much customers use your product on a month-to-month basis, sales revenue fluctuates.

An example of a partner ecosystem with variable revenue is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS used to let partners like value-added resellers (VARs) and IT service companies buy discounted cloud capacity in bulk and resell it to customers at predictable, fixed prices.

Starting from June 2025, Amazon declared this practice to be against its Terms of Service. Now, both clients and distributors must pay as they go, based on how much end customers use the cloud each month.

Beyond making partner revenue growth less predictable:

• The partners who were previously buying discount bundles and reselling them have lost an easy source of profit

• Partners now need to track cloud usage so they can bill customers accurately

• To stay profitable, partners now need to offer additional services like support or cybersecurity

To manage unpredictable revenue in consumption-based models, partners should diversify their offerings by bundling services such as onboarding, training and support to create steady income streams.

Data governance risks

Companies that fail to manage their partners’ data carefully risk legal and reputational consequences.

As more and more companies partner with SaaS apps, data security incidents are becoming increasingly common. According to research by Valence, 58% of organizations have experienced at least one SaaS-related security breach since 2023.

Many incidents occur when companies provide SaaS partners with API access, Open Authorization (OAuth) tokens or sharing permissions once and then forget about them.

Permissions are rarely set up to expire. As a result, months after a partnership ends, that partner likely still has access to sensitive data.

The massive volume of unsecured partnership data online presents a tempting target for hackers. Cloud Security Alliance reports that users have forgotten about 90% of shared data, which lies dormant.

Regulators are aware of the risks to consumer data and have established laws like GDPR to protect individuals. Companies that flout these laws and are careless with partner data risk fines of millions of dollars.

To mitigate data governance risks, enforce strict access controls with automated expiration for partner permissions and regularly audit all shared data.

Challenges with acquired partners

When large companies acquire smaller managed service providers (MSPs), other companies that are partners of the smaller company face challenges.

For example, when Kaseya acquired Datto in 2022, Datto’s partners publicly voiced concerns about:

• Being forced to use Kaseya’s tools, instead of being able to mix and match different tools from different companies

• The cost of switching to Kaseya’s tools being prohibitively high and time-consuming

• Datto’s staff being unhappy due to reduced benefits, with the quality of service going down as a result

After the deal, some partners experienced billing issues, including unwanted renewals, incorrect charges and difficulty canceling services.

Other MSPs faced an increase in bugs and outages. When they tried to address these problems with support, they also noticed that support had become slower.

All these issues weakened the partners Kaseya had inherited from Datto. The damage to Kaseya’s reputation also made it harder to find new partners to work with.

To address challenges with acquired partners, provide transitional support that allows partners to continue using preferred tools and support resources while gradually integrating new systems.

Complex co-selling

When co-selling is too difficult, partner engagement in the process drops.

The numbers bear this out. Clazar’s 2025 State of Cloud Marketplace & Co-Sell report found that 51% of SaaS companies view co-selling complexity as an impediment to scaling their marketing partnerships.

The leading cause of co-selling complexity is the lack of alignment between partners’ sales and revenue operations (RevOps) teams. Clazar’s report found that:

• 29% of RevOps teams are fully aligned

• 22% of sales teams are fully aligned

Alignment often suffers when partners don’t check in with each other regularly to review their joint pipeline or map accounts. Only 32% of partners have a regular cadence for checking in.

Some of the co-selling complexity also stems from partners not knowing how to integrate partner data into their CRM. According to Clazar, 37% of SaaS companies struggle with this.

SaaS companies often struggle to train their in-house teams to align with partners and manage their data effectively. 59% of companies in the report mentioned a lack of internal training and enablement.

To reduce co-selling complexity, establish regular joint pipeline reviews, clear account mapping processes and shared CRM practices that ensure alignment between sales and RevOps teams.

7. Track and measure partner performance

To measure the success of your partnerships, consider implementing one of the following frameworks and tracking all the metrics below.

Frameworks

Here are three frameworks that businesses commonly use to analyze partner performance.

Balanced Scorecard: A means for businesses to analyze their performance from the following four key perspectives at once.

To apply the Scorecard to a partnership, a company would select 3–5 metrics in each of these areas and review them monthly.

For example, under “Customer”, you could reflect how likely the partner’s lead generation activity is to convert into customers.

Under “Learning and Growth”, you could consider to what extent the partner is adapting as your strategy changes.

Partnership health index: Measures the value of your partnerships by combining quantitative data with qualitative insights about the strength of the relationship.

On the quantitative side, you could ask questions like:

• How much revenue is this partner generating every month?

• What is the cost of onboarding customers that come from this partner?

• What is the customer satisfaction score of users who come from this partner?

Additionally, reflect on questions like these to determine the quality of the relationship itself:

• How consistently does the partner engage with us on calls?

• How responsive are they when we send them an email?

• How much do we trust them?

The best partners are those that deliver ROI but also consistently act in trustworthy ways.

Attribution frameworks: Help you figure out how much revenue is attributable to each partner. This can be a complex task in multi-touch sales processes that combine elements from multiple partners.

The two main ways to attribute value are:

• First touch. The partner who gets credited for the sale is the one with whom the customer first interacted. An interaction can be as simple as visiting a website, watching a YouTube video, reading a blog post or even attending a corporate event.

• Last touch. The partner who gets credited is the one with whom the customer interacted right before the sale. For example, if the customer purchases on partner A’s website after reading partner B’s content, partner A gets the credit.

If these methods seem too complicated, consider a linear attribution model, where all touchpoints are given equal weighting.

So, if there are nine touchpoints in the sale and three were on partner A’s site and six on partner B’s, partner B would get the credit.

Partnership metrics

Ensure you track the following partner KPIs to assess the success of your partnerships.

• Web traffic: How much traffic to your website can be attributed to your partners?
  
  

• Leads generated: How many leads do your partners generate for you each month?
  
  

• Cost per lead: How much does it cost you to generate one of those leads, on average?
  
  

• Attributed sales: How many direct sales can you reliably attribute to each partner?
  
  

• Customer lifetime value: Over the duration of your business relationship, how much revenue do you expect to receive from a customer that has come from your partnerships?

It’s wise to check these on a monthly basis to see which partners are driving growth. A good partner relationship management (PRM) tool will help you do this.

8. Systemize partner management in one place with Pipedrive

Best known as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, Pipedrive doubles as a partnership management platform for teams that want to manage their partnerships strategically.

Organizing partnerships with Pipedrive is more scalable than a system of spreadsheets since it:

• Can track the relationship history of a particular partnership

• Is a single source of truth, so lacks issues with version control

• Automates reporting in a couple of clicks

Here are three ways you can use Pipedrive to build a comprehensive partner strategy.

Keep all your partnership data in one place

Pipedrive allows you to create custom pipelines for various types of partnerships, just as you would for your leads and customers.

Your partnership pipelines can have custom stages, such as:

• Outreach

• Negotiation

• Agreement signed

• Marketing campaign active

• Follow up

Each card in a partnership pipeline represents one individual partner. You can add contacts for each partner, such as the account manager or marketing manager you’re working with.

By default, Pipedrive logs all the activities and communication related to each partner on their card. There’s a record of every call, email, meeting and follow-up task.

With Pipedrive, it’s easy to see where a particular partner is in your partnership process, look up your previous history with that partner and keep your team accountable for taking any next steps with them.

Segment new partners and prioritize the highest-value ones

Segmenting your partners allows your team to focus on those that have the greatest strategic value.

Pipedrive makes segmentation easy. Simply create custom fields for all the segmentation criteria that matter to you and add the relevant data for each partner.

Common segmentation criteria include:

• Partner type, e.g., reseller, MSP, affiliate, etc.

• Industry

• Location

• Size

• Partner tier, e.g., gold, preferred, certified, etc.

• Estimated annual revenue

A simple way to prioritize the highest-value partners is to create a formula field. You can customize the formula to automatically assign a score to each partner.

For example, you could score each partner between 1–10 for audience, lead quality, performance and strategic relevance. Pipedrive would then automatically create a score out of 40.

Alternatively, create another custom field and manually insert the score out of 40.

In the above example, you could say that partners with a score of 25 or more are high priority, so you’ll invest most of your time and effort into those relationships.

Use AI to support resource-limited partners

It’s often beneficial to create resources for partners who lack them and AI makes this quick and easy.

Smaller partners often won’t have the time and money to produce marketing materials like:

• Email templates

• Social media templates

• Landing page templates

You can help them by using Pipedrive’s AI email generator to create messaging that’s tailored to a particular partner segment.

Do this a few dozen times and you’ll have a playbook of AI-generated templates. Your partners will have high-quality content they can copy and paste instantly, eliminating their creative bottleneck.

You can store the templates in Pipedrive’s Smart Docs or send them to partners using automated emails.

Resource-limited partners may also appreciate you sending regular reports that show the progress of the partnership, particularly from a financial perspective.

Again, you can automate both the creation and scheduling of these reports in Pipedrive.

8 essential types of channel partner strategies

To build a scalable revenue engine, you must understand that "partnership" is not a single task, but a collection of specialized strategies. Below are the eight core types of strategies every growing business needs to master.

1. Channel partner strategy plan

This is the foundational type of strategy. It serves as the master blueprint that aligns your internal business goals with your external partner goals. Without a clear channel partner strategy plan, your team will lack the KPIs and roadmap needed to measure if partnerships are actually profitable or just a distraction.

2. Channel partner recruitment strategy

This strategy type focuses on the "top of the funnel." A successful channel partner recruitment strategy identifies and attracts high-quality partners who already have access to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

• Key focus: Outreach, vetting and signing partners who add value without creating competition.

3. SaaS channel partner strategy

SaaS channel partner strategy focuses on the tech stack, prioritizing integrations with tools your customers already use, such as Pipedrive, Slack or Zoom

• Key focus: Using APIs and marketplaces to create a "sticky" product ecosystem that reduces customer churn.

4. Channel partner marketing strategy

This type is about amplification. A channel partner marketing strategy leverages the partner's existing trust and audience to generate leads.

• Key tactics: Co-branded webinars, guest blogging and social media takeovers that put your brand in front of thousands of new eyes instantly.

5. Channel partner enablement strategy

A channel partner enablement strategy is the "teaching" arm of your program. If a partner isn't selling, it’s usually because they don’t understand the product.

• Key tactics: Providing sales playbooks, email templates and product certification courses to make the partner's team "experts" on your behalf.

6. Channel partner sales strategy

While marketing generates interest, the channel partner sales strategy is what closes the deal. This type manages the "bottom of the funnel" mechanics.

• Key focus: Deal registration (to prevent conflict), joint sales calls and commission structures that incentivize the partner to prioritize your product over others.

7. Channel partner management strategy

This is the "relationship" type of strategy. A channel partner management strategy ensures that once a partner is onboarded, they remain active and happy.

• Key tactics: Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), partner tiering (e.g., Gold/Silver levels) and using a PRM (Partner Relationship Management) tool to track health scores.

8. Channel Partner Strategy

Finally, the general channel partner strategy is the overarching approach to utilizing third parties to access new markets. It balances all the above types to ensure that the partnership program remains a reliable, transparent and scalable revenue source.

Final thoughts

To scale with partnerships, partner with non-competing businesses that sell to the same types of customers as you.

There are various models for establishing a win-win relationship, including affiliation, co-marketing and shared integrations. As you grow, track their success using frameworks like the Balanced Scorecard and metrics like CLV. Just make sure you de-risk each partnership before scaling it.

Pipedrive can help business leaders organize partners by segment and keep all their information in one central location.

If you’re interested in reselling Pipedrive, join its solution provider partnership program to receive commission, training and networking opportunities.