Partner programs help SMBs expand into new markets through existing networks without the overhead of traditional sales and marketing.
In this post, you’ll learn how to create a partner program that will help you grow your small business.
Discover incentive structures that other companies are using to build win-win relationships, plus how to use software to manage your partners as you acquire them.
Key takeaways from partner programs
Partner marketing is often a faster go-to-market strategy than setting up marketing infrastructure from scratch.
A typical partner program includes a win-win incentive structure, multiple partner tiers, a co-marketing handbook and options for training or certification.
Use a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess your partners’ performance continuously.
Pipedrive’s CRM offers functionality similar to the best partner program software – sign up for a 14-day free trial today to start organizing your partnerships.
Why should SMBs create a partner program?
Partnerships with non-competing businesses that share a target audience are a powerful way to accelerate growth for SMBs.
Partner program benefits include:
Growing through partners’ networks, removing the need to hire employees to do cold sales outreach
Accessing adjacent markets and leveraging the trust your partners have already built there
Bundling your services with those of your partners to create new offers for customers
Outsourcing parts of the value chain that aren’t in your area of expertise to partners
As the number of partners grows, it becomes inefficient to negotiate every single aspect of each partner relationship from scratch. It’s faster to assign partners to a program that defines baseline terms, then address any exceptions as they arise.
Here are some typical features of partner programs:
Feature | Description |
Onboarding process | A checklist of tasks to help partners start working with you as smoothly as possible. |
Expectations | How often partners should communicate with you and what you need from them to make the partnership a success. |
Contact details | The person whom partners should contact with any questions, along with the contact medium they should use. |
Incentive structure | When and how you pay partners, how much you pay and for what actions. |
Tiers | What partnership tiers you offer, the benefits available to partners in each tier and how to advance from tier to tier. |
Co-marketing handbook | Guidance for marketing tasks that partners need to perform, plus sales collateral to support their efforts. |
Training | Certifications, training and online courses that you offer to help partners improve in their roles. |
In the rest of this article, you’ll discover five best practices that will help you create a partner program you can use to grow your small business.
1. Design a win-win value proposition
For any partnership to endure, it needs to make business sense for both parties.
A win doesn’t always mean that both sides get exactly the same thing out of the relationship, particularly when one partner has more leverage than the other.
More often, rewards are asymmetrical. A service provider receives a percentage of sales from a product it resells, or an influencer earns money while the software they promote receives social proof – as in this example from Threadbox.ai:
To build a mutually beneficial relationship with your partners, resist the temptation to pitch your business and go into the conversation seeking to understand theirs. Look for areas where they’re stronger, you’re weaker and vice versa.
Example: Imagine you’re a platform that helps businesses run operations smoothly. Your software excels at project management but lacks a way for users to have video calls.
Your partner is a video call platform that provides the functionality you need. It lacks an audience, so it wants you to feature it on your integrations page.
In this situation, anintegration partnership would be in both companies’ interests.
At the start of the relationship, clarify which elements of the partnership are your responsibility, which belong to your partner and at what stage you’ll hand projects off.
This benefits both because you can concentrate on your area of expertise, safe in the knowledge that your partner is focusing on their strongest area – not duplicating work you’ve already done.
To ensure your partnership remains win-win, give both parties options to deepen engagement over time if it suits their needs or back away if the partnership is no longer valuable. For example:
Develop multiple partner tiers so partners can choose what level they engage at
Create options for partners to move up and down your list of tiers
Ensure partners have a clear exit plan that’s available anytime, rather than locking them into a contract for months
Instead of asking for exclusivity, allow partners to form win-win relationships with other businesses if it benefits them
Optionality allows you to operate from a position of strength. Either you develop a win-win relationship or walk away.
2. Choose a fair incentive model that rewards success
Design an incentive model that ensures profitability for both partners and matches each side’s individual contribution.
There are hundreds of ways to monetize partnerships. Here are a few of the most common:
Referral fee | A flat fee you pay a partner in exchange for them referring you a lead or a customer. |
Revenue share | A percentage of the revenue you earn from a client, often paid to partners monthly. |
Commission | A percentage of the revenue you earn when a partner closes a deal. |
Tiered rewards | Incentives that become more meaningful as partners invest more in the relationship and climb up your partner tiers. |
Wholesale pricing | A pricing discount you give to partners who resell your product |
Preferred partner pricing | A pricing discount you give to partners you hold in high regard. |
Non-financial incentives | Generally provide social proof such as badges or perks like priority support. |
Incentive models suit some types of partners better than others.
Example: If your partner resells your CRM software, you could pay them a revenue share and give them a wholesale price, but it wouldn’t make sense to pay them a referral fee.
To figure out how generous your incentive package should be, look for publicly available data about how much other companies in your industry pay partners and use that as a benchmark.
Here are some benchmarks from the SaaS world to give you an idea:
To adapt the benchmarks to your specific situation, consider risk, complexity and the duration of your partner’s contribution. It makes sense to pay more to a partner who assumes more risk and contributes complex workflows over a long period than one who performs a simple, risk-free task once.
Additionally, reflect on how much flexibility each party needs.
If your goal is a long-term business relationship, paying monthly referral fees on a tiered basis matches that intention. If you suspect your partners will flit in and out of your business when it suits them, commission might be a better fit.
3. Prepare onboarding materials to reduce friction for new partners
Onboarding is a useful way to communicate your expectations to partners and make their first few days as smooth as possible.
If you run a product business and your partners sell your product or train customers in using it, giving new partners a sales deck like this one from Palo Alto Networks will speed up their learning:
You could also provide demo videos or create free accounts so they can experience your product more hands-on.
In cases where partners support you with sales and marketing, it’s wise to create a playbook that spells out:
Which type of sales and marketing activities both sides are responsible for
Situations where partners need to ask for your consent before taking action
Best practices that often led to sales in the past
Download Your Sales and Marketing Strategy Guide
Ensure co-marketing partners have access to any assets they need, such as logos, images, banners, flyers, landing pages or analytics platforms.
Pro tip: To avoid partners competing with each other or with your sales team for deals, implement a deal registration process and explain to partners exactly how it works. In most cases, the party that registers the deal first gets credit for it, at which point other parties can no longer interact with that customer.
Even the most professional partnerships experience conflict on occasion, so your onboarding materials should detail your escalation process and whom partners can turn to for support.
Businesses typically share onboarding materials with partners in a partnership handbook or on a partner portal. In the latter case, make sure you create accounts for your partners and share login details.
Once your onboarding materials are ready, build a quick-start checklist of the top 3–5 actions partners need to take to get started. Very often, this will include reading the handbook you compiled.
4. Determine how you’ll measure your partnerships’ success
Identify the metrics you’ll use to assess the effectiveness of your partnerships before launching your partner program.
Typically, businesses look at quantitative metrics to get an overview of which partnerships are performing well, then use qualitative metrics to figure out the story behind the numbers.
Quantitative metrics
If your partners are involved in sales, consider how much revenue they brought in and the average deal size. Keep an eye on how many leads they generated, even if not all those leads turned into customers.
For partners responsible for customer success, look at how many of the relationships they managed have lasted more than one year. Analyze the average customer satisfaction score of accounts they were on and look at how many tickets those accounts generated for your customer service team.
Qualitative metrics
Ask employees who interacted with partners how communicative each partner was. Look at your partnership relationship management (PRM) tool for evidence of engagement, like comments on threads or adherence to deadlines.
In cases where partners are responsible for co-marketing, investigate how much they’ve done and how invested they were in the process. Review their social media accounts, read any email campaigns they copied you in and consider whether you met them at any industry events. Ensure partners adhere to deal registration guidelines after generating leads.
Look for signs of initiative from your partners. Perhaps they suggest ways to optimize your guidelines based on their experience or propose an entirely new form of partnership you haven’t considered. Innovative partners might also open up new sales channels or offer a fresh take on social media marketing strategy.
5. Use partner program software to manage your partners
When you design a partner program, you need partner management software to help you organize your partners, especially at scale.
It’s not sufficient to rely on spreadsheets and email, since:
Spreadsheets lack version control, meaning your team won’t know which spreadsheet version has the most up-to-date contact information and communication records.
It’s easy to lose track of important details like next steps in long email threads with partners.
While Pipedrive is best known as customer relationship management (CRM) software, many businesses also use it to manage their partnership databases.
Pipedrive in action: Wilderness International used Pipedrive to quickly store partner data, automate workflows and track all partner interactions in one place. As a result, it doubled its number of partners and increased donations by 30%.
With Pipedrive, you can create a dedicated pipeline for your partner relationships or even multiple pipelines for different partnership types.
Your team can centralize all its notes on communication with partners. Since Pipedrive automatically records past actions, you’ll be able to see all your team’s activities on each partner account. You can also plan the next steps for each partner.
Customize each pipeline with stages that match your process. Add custom fields to track key data points, such as each partner’s tier and incentive model.
You can even create a custom workflow that maps out the onboarding steps for each partner.
Choose the metrics that matter most to your partner program and track them in your Pipedrive dashboard. Once you’ve selected the metrics, it’s easy to generate a report for senior leadership in a couple of clicks.
Plus, you can score your partners using Pipedrive’s Pulse toolkit. Once you’ve activated them, scores automatically update as partner data changes.
Examples of partner programs to inspire you
Here are some ideas from real companies that have successfully launched partner programs.
Affiliate: Webflow’s affiliate program pays a share of monthly recurring revenue to freelancers, agencies and entrepreneurs for each client who signs up through their affiliate link.
Referral: Trello’s referral program gives existing customers a free month of Trello Gold for each friend they refer.
Technology: AmDocs’ MarketONE program allows SaaS companies to connect with hundreds of telecom companies through one integration.
Independent software vendor (ISV): Pipedrive’s solution provider partnership program allows providers to resell Pipedrive and add on services, including onboarding, training and implementation.
Co-marketing: Shopify’s partner program markets apps to Shopify customers through featured app spotlights, joint webinars, partner badges and events.
Let the above use cases inspire you to create a partner ecosystem for your small business as you scale.
Final thoughts
With a proper incentive structure, you can create a partner program that’s a win for both your SMB and your partners.
Investing in onboarding will nudge partners toward success, and you can use the metrics you identified to measure their progress.
Pipedrive can help you organize your partnerships and streamline communication, especially as you scale. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today and watch your business grow through partnership building.
