The stages of partner relationship management
Most programs move each partner through the same stages:
- Recruit. Find partners whose customers match yours and invite them to apply.
- Onboard. Approve them, sign an agreement, collect tax forms and get them to a first referral quickly. See the partner onboarding guide.
- Enable. Teach them your product, your ideal customer and how to position you, through training and sales material.
- Sell together. Take referrals, register deals and work some opportunities jointly through co-selling.
- Reward. Pay commissions accurately and on time, and move productive partners up through partner tiers.
- Review. Check each partner's results on a schedule and decide where to spend more time.
Practice vs software
The practice is the decisions: who you recruit, what you pay, which rules settle disputes and how often you review partners. PRM software is the system that records and automates those decisions. A clear practice on a spreadsheet beats a vague one on expensive software, but past a few dozen partners the manual work starts to crowd out the work that grows the program.
Why it matters
Partners choose where to spend their time. A partner who gets slow answers, unclear status and late payments will send their next client to a vendor who is easier to work with. Good partner relationship management makes you that easier vendor.
Example
Lumen Health sells patient scheduling software and has one partner manager looking after 40 partners. She splits them by results: the eight partners who sourced revenue in the last year get a monthly call and a quarterly review, and the rest get onboarding, training and a monthly newsletter.
When Cobalt Consulting joins, it gets a signed agreement, a W-9 request and a short course in its first week. Cobalt sends its first referral in week three. The partner manager tracks Cobalt's time to first referral alongside the other new partners, and moves Cobalt to the monthly call group once it closes two deals worth $30,000 combined.