Notes for partner teams.
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Partners leave quietly. How it feels to work with you is usually the reason.Most of the partners you lose this year won't send a breakup email. They just stop selling.3 min readRecruitment is vanity. Activation is the metric that pays.You could sign a hundred new partners this quarter and still not move the number.3 min readExperience and engagement are one loop, not two programs.They usually get budgeted separately, with separate owners. That is the mistake.3 min readThe count question has no answer. Ask what the week is spent on instead.Look up the right number of partners per partner manager and you will find answers that disagree by an order of magnitude.3 min readProcurement has moved to the marketplace. Most programs cannot credit the deal.Your partner program was designed around a purchase order you controlled. A growing share of the money now moves through someone else’s checkout.3 min readPartner teams report activity. Finance funds outcomes.No partner budget in history has ever been approved because of a dashboard.3 min readPartners are inside the part of the buying journey you cannot observe.The deals that cost you most are not the ones you lose. They are the ones you never knew were happening.3 min readThe portal was built as a destination. Partners stopped travelling.Customer experience got a decade of investment. Partner experience got a login.4 min readPartnerships is behind on AI. It never made its own work legible to a model.I spent two days at a partnerships summit recently. AI came up in almost every conversation yet the most common question was what is a valuable use case?4 min readA practical guide to measuring partner program ROI.Many partner programs can't prove their return.6 min read