Salesfire is an all-in-one conversion rate optimisation platform for e-commerce retailers. As more of its new clients arrived through recommendations from digital agencies, the company needed a partner motion that could keep up.
The challenge
Salesfire's referral process had grown up ad hoc. Everything lived in Google Sheets: referrals, tracking, partner contacts and commission calculations. Once more than ten partners were involved, things started falling through the cracks.
Partners had no visibility into deal status, no access to marketing material or training, and payouts were calculated and sent by hand.
“We could see a clear trend. More and more new clients were coming to us via agency recommendations. But our referral process was completely ad hoc.”
What Salesfire implemented
Salesfire moved the whole motion onto Partner.io, connected to HubSpot, Slack and Stripe.
- A branded partner portal. One hub where partners refer leads, follow their progress, and find training and marketing assets.
- Automated referral tracking. End-to-end visibility of every referral for both partners and the internal team, with leads synced to HubSpot.
- Commission workflows. Commissions calculated from the program tier, approved in Partner.io and paid without spreadsheets.
- Co-branded quick referral pages. Referral pages launched in seconds, matched to each partner's branding, with no login required to refer.
Within days of going live, partners were logging into the portal, submitting leads, tracking their progress and accessing content on demand.
“Seeing partners log into the portal and start sending referrals on their own was the moment we knew we'd made the right choice.”
The outcomes
Partner referrals grew by 320%. Salesfire onboarded more than 120 partners across 12 countries, and the team saved hundreds of hours a month that previously went on manual tracking and payout admin.
What Salesfire learned
- Manual processes don't scale. Ten partners was enough to break the spreadsheet system.
- Partners expect more. Visibility, self-serve tools and automation are now baseline expectations.
- Structure enables growth. Professionalising the process opened the door to global scale.
“Before Partner.io, our partner program felt a bit chaotic. Partner.io gave us the structure we needed to scale it properly.”