Service partner

Great question! I recommend you spend time meeting with individual team members - the CSMs and support agents actually working with your customers - to get a better understanding of their day to day before trying to get them to leverage service partners. It's important to recognize how busy these teammates are already just trying to ensure customers are happy and they may not have immediate capacity to take on something new like leveraging a service partner. Once you do find teammates that have capacity, be sure to work with them to educate other teammates on the benefits they experienced while working with you to leverage said service partner.

Facts and data will help you prove the case. Showing a business case that supports reducing the costs to the business by off-loading services the partners can provide. Most internal support teams are limited with their resources so share how partners can take on those services to help them achieve their goals (retention, resolutions, call time etc). Also showing either in-house or industry data around retention of customers through partners. Normally better retention rates are possible through partners which means (in SaaS) billings continue longer and the CLV is more valuable to the company. Share how specific partners are driving value for your competition.  

I’ll answer this question with a question (annoying, I know.) What value does the customer success and support team get from service partners? This is a question that my team has been working on with our customer success team, all year. We’ve created workflows to incorporate partners into renewal and upsell conversations, or to help smooth out friction with customers experiencing challenges. But until you know how your CS/Support team perceives Partnerships, as well as what their needs are, it will be hard to drive adoption of service partners.

Good enablement is essential for anybody in your organisation to be able to leverage service partners.  The main objective of the enablement sessions should be that the teams have a good understanding of the value that partner will drive to their clients/prospects, are confident in how your teams would work together, and ultimately trust those partner to make them look good. 

Three things that can be done to help support this and build trust are; 

1. A strong joint value proposition
2. Multiple case studies with mutual clients 
3. identify the key signals that indicate that client or prospect could benefit from your services partners offering. 


1. Start by creating a customer success plan. This will help outline the goals and objectives of your customer success team, as well as how they can work with service partners to achieve these goals.

2. Make sure your customer success team is properly trained on how to work with service partners. They should understand the role these partners play in achieving customer success, and be able to effectively communicate with them.

3. Work with your service partners to create a strategy for customer success. This should include the services they offer, as well as how they can help support your customers’ success.

4. Cooperate with your service partners to measure customer success. This will help you track progress and ensure that both your team and your service partners are meeting the needs of your customers.

This is a bit tough to answer without more context. It depends if your CS team is designed to service accounts or not, and if that is an additional revenue stream for your company or not. 

Basically, you have to find an angle that a service partner either saves them time/work and improves the end product/experience for your users.

Figure out what their goals are and what challenges they experience. Then try and solve for those with your service partners.

Additionally, what data can you find to support how beneficial your service partners are? Do they have a higher Avg Sales Price (ASP)? Do they retain longer? Do they use more features? Give them quantitative data on top of qualitative data to build your biz case.

This can be tricky, but very doable. There are many ways to accomplish this, and one of the easiest is leveraging community. If your support uses a specific tool to chat with customers, for example, you could leverage AI to try to answer questions that the community has already answered. 

Also, usually service partners are usually the first line of defense for your customers and their questions. You can relieve support if you create special levels of support for your partners so they can better support their clients. Enable the partners to field their client's questions where possible. 


I'm assuming this question is asking about internal teams referring customers to service partners for services you don't offer directly (aka outbound referrals). In the spirit of the old adage "People will do what you pay them to do," pay them! Even small spiffs like $50 per qualified referral can go a long way toward creating momentum.

What's more, your service partners want those leads more than any other partner incentive, including cash, and they should be willing to pay you a commission just like you pay your partners commission for referrals they send to you. Those commissions should offset the cost of the spiffs, and then some, creating an additional incremental revenue stream that didn't exist previously. 

In addition to spiffs, proper enablement is key as well. Your internal teams need to know who the service partners, something about the services they offer, and the referral motion should be simple and easy so as not to create additional cognitive overhead in an already chaotic business environment. 

Treat your internal teams as you do your service partners – after all, they are your partners internally. What’s in it for them? How does working with a partner help them to achieve their objectives? If you don’t have clear answers to those two questions, then it won’t be clear to your CX org why they should leverage service partners either. 

Think about the types of partners you work with; what problems do they help you to solve? Service partners are generally filling a gap your CX org can’t provide for your customers. Lean into that.

For example, at PandaDoc our key integration partners are CRMs, so we rely on service partners that are experts in those CRMs to help our customers better adopt PandaDoc in their sales processes. We can’t expect our CX org to be experts in every CRM on the market, so leveraging service partners directly helps the CX org when it comes to customer product adoption, which in turn impacts retention. 

Enablement is also key here. If adding a service provider into your CX processes requires more manual work on the CX side, thereby causing friction and slowing down systems, then they will never work with your partners. You need to embed your partners directly into your existing processes, not add more work for your CX org. Creating enablement programs for both your internal teams and service partners allows you to define clear swim lanes for each party, enabling them to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Championing your CS team is key! The approach to all functions within an organisation is to drive value for customers and prospects. So service partners should always be thought of as an extension of our team. Defining a service package is something you should work with CS on, so there's full buy-in from the get go. 

There’s a few ways I like to work with CS:
1. Listening to their customer calls and understanding pain points so I know where service partners can fit in
2. Using partner marketing events to drive customer attendance and start to conversations with service partners
3. Introducing service partners before the deal closes, so they can support with any implementation or onboarding services


How can I get the customer success and support teams in my company to leverage service partners?

This question is a bit like another question previously asked here, so I'll copy that answer in below. The TLDR is make sure your commission target is absolutely aligned with your overall goal, otherwise your partner managers will be working on something that doesn't mean as much to leadership, goals will be misaligned, and your partner team won't feel like their work is being valued.

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This really depends on your goals and there's no easy answer here. In the past, I've had my commissions tied to MRR because my goals were MRR focused. That drove me to create partnerships that would specifically encourage customers to sign up for paid plans, or free plans that would then be converted quickly.

Make sure you're super aligned on your goals and how partner managers will be trying to hit them. If commissions are tried to sign ups as a whole, for example, but leadership actually wants you driving MRR, then you might be misaligned as your partner managers will create relationships that drive free trials or free sign ups, as it's easier to get a customer in that way, but if the flywheel isn't making it easy for those free sign ups to convert, you won't hit your MRR goal.

Can you share how commission targets for Partner Mangagers have played into your strategy, if at all? 

Ask your Implementation and Support teams on what they see most often as blockers to completing an integration, make sure your partners can handle these situations, or better yet solve them completely. 
Make sure that the work you want partners to do is appealing to them and they get value out of the work. New implementations and support going to your partners should be labeled as opportunities for the partner to grow their business, not differed work for your teams. 

Great question! The first step is to validate their performance in an objective way to see if their clients are as satisfied with their work as they claim to provide. This will help you determine which partners are worth inviting into the v1 of a certified services/experts partner program - especially if you plan on sending referrals to them out of the gate. Once these partners start working with your customers, you can start to determine what program tiers/measurement could look like.

This is a fantastic question - and I love this. 
Start your Partner Program, and detail what they get for joining. What’s in it for them? Remember: all of this can be inspired by them! You can see how I structured Glide’s Expert Program here:
https://www.glideapps.com/experts-program

“Certified” will require some level of education and a pass/fail test.  The easiest way for this is to build education around your SAAS with learning components. I would also add one more condition here - something that requires your partners to have "skin in the game". 
For example, to become a Glide Certified Expert you need:  
-Pass the highest level of certification from Glide University
-Upgrade 3 clients to a paid team OR purchase the Agency plan

You can see here how I made it clear on how to be a Certified Expert here:
https://www.glideapps.com/docs/reference/account/experts

One side note: 
The design of a whole and complete partner program takes time. You DO NOT have to build it to completion for a launch. Build it as you go, and always test to see if they are adopting and make adjustments on the fly. The more they are asking for more features and perks - these become your roadmap for level 2. I’ve been at Glide for a year now - and I only have 2 levels to the Experts Program. Level 3 will probably come this year. 


Create an IPP – Ideal Partner Profile. Identify qualifiers and disqualifiers of the types of partners you need for your product. Jumping into an established ecosystem can be daunting, there can be thousands of service providers to choose from. Clearly define who you need to be working with.

Look to other partner programs that are enabling their partners well. What type of content is in their learning academies? How are they rewarding their partners? Start talking to those service providers and ask them directly what they need to be successful. 

Start small and iterate. You can build a simple eLearning course, and start getting feedback from your partners on what is missing and the level of difficulty. Think about what your partners would need to be certified in – is it a specific integration or complex use case? Build a course around that, whether it be an eLearning or a virtual classroom series. 

Provide co-marketing opportunities. It can be as simple as your partner putting a badge on their website, or building a campaign around a specific use case this partner is a subject matter expert in. Give them opportunities to showcase to their audience that they are bought in to your product, and are experts in it. This will attract other service providers in that ecosystem.

My SaaS vertical has a strong ecosystem of services providers that we want to provide implementation/support/strategy for our customers. How do I go about building a certified services/experts partner program?

When they breach your code of conduct that they've signed before joining your partner program. It is important to make performance expectations clear out of the gate, and a code of conduct does just that in an objective way. It is critical to have this part formalized as you need something to fallback on if you are going to remove them from a program they may be currently deriving benefits from. From my experience, the majority of the code of conduct is written based on ensuring they are acting in a way that represents your own company's values when dealing with customers. 

In an ideal case - the partners you choose/find are great fit for your program overall (with similar categories/ranking to Daniel's message). However I think that you will also find that some partners are fantastic fits for your program but just for specific departments (e.g. a partner which is fantastic for on and offline marketing events but not ideal for co-selling with your sales reps).

If you've heard of the 4 C's of buying diamonds (cut, color, clarity, carat), then let me share with you the 4 C's of picking the right partner. If you don't have a good stone or a good partner it's not the end of the world, but you should know going in that you may not have the best fit. 

Here are the 4 things I look for, and how I score new potential partners:

1. Culture - do you have strong alignment with the mission, vision and values of your organizations and of your teams? Do you feel good about putting this partner in front of your customers and vice versa?
2. Capacity - what capacity and resources do you have on each side to commit to partner? This could be in the form of sales, engineering, marketing, exec sponsorship and more. 
3. Commitment - What is the desire and interest to work together driven by? Is this a single deal, or a chance to do 100 or 1000 deals or projects together? 
4. Competencies - what do they know about your company, customers, technologies and platform?

If they don't score highly then maybe the right answer is that you have to say no now or know when you would like to get back together as business and priorities and programs can change.

If you have a clear IPP and set out some criteria for a Partnership from lessons learned then i think it should be pretty clear. 
Outside of the data, remember that these are relationships at the end of the day so listen to your gut when you need to and don't overlook the importance of cultural alignment. Just because a Partner is not a good fit for you, doesn't mean they are a bad Partner, just means they are not right for you. chances are they are probably having the same hesitations about you.

How do you know when a partner is NOT a good fit for your program?

I've seen succuss with meeting with partners to show them a one-on-one demo of the product or asking them for product feedback. I also provide free sandboxes so long as we are moving towards partnership.  

1. Introductions to your clients
2. Cash poured directly into their customers acquisition by sponsoring marketing efforts (like content and irl events)
3. Introductions to your partners (it's surprising how valuable this can be!)

One little tactical tip to employ is: helping your partners to be experts

It's such a small thing, but when you spot that key partners are giving public talks that involve your area of work (e.g. we sell AI for customer service in retail), proactively offer to help them prepare. Ultimately, partnerships is about human<>human relationships; so any opportunity to build a better relationship with people that serve your ideal clients is something to jump at!

We at Opensend are fortunately in a unique position where we can offer our B2B product to our referring partners, at no charge, allowing us to immediately offer value at the start of any partnership. If you are able to replicate this in any type of way, I strongly suggest you do. That being said, here's some ways to ensure you are giving, to get: 

1. Lead sharing: give partners quality leads or referrals.
2. Training: help partners get up to speed with product demos and guides.
3. Collateral: share ready-to-use pitch decks, case studies.
4. Exclusive access: offer early product access, higher rev share, or discounts for customers. 
5. Marketing support: provide co-branded campaigns and promotions.
6. Technical support: offer direct access to support and resources.
7. Investment: support their initiatives. 

This actions will ensure partners feel supported and motivated to reciprocate.

Hello, using the idea of "give value first and early" in the partnership. What type of resources that you guys give to your partner in order to give the first value to the partner? Could you rank the most effective ways to create a reciprocity from you partner?

I love this question mainly because this is an underserved area.

Partnerships at a PLG company are challenging, because customers can self-sign up without any touch point from Sales or partners, and there isn’t true visibility into the impact partners have on the revenue of the business. 

Ideally a PLG company should be able to show which partners have impact on which customer referrals and which partners are currently working with which customers. You need to be able to prove the impact Partnerships has on net new business as well as on retained revenue.

What metrics matter the most for PLG SaaS companies that are working with partners and trying to show the impact of their ecosystem of service partners?

Creating a scalable partner program requires automation, clear segmentation, self-serve enablement, and high-touch engagement for priority partners. 

1. Standardized and automated onboarding. 
- Partner playbooks with enablement docs: provide detailed guides on how to sell, integrate, and optimize your product, service, offering, etc. 
- Partner portal: dedicated hub with resources and enablement. This can include deal registration, performance tracking, training, and more. 
- Training and certification: offer tiered certifications or training modeules that partners can complete at their own pace. 

2. Segmented tiering and scalable support. 
- Not all partners are the same: Define different tiers of partners with varying levels of support. 

3. Incentivized activation. 
- Clear activation milestones. 
- Gamification. 
- Time sensetive bonuses, encouraging quick activation. 

4. Scalable co-marketing and lead sharing. 
- Provide templates for partners to quickly personalize and use. 
- Partner directory featuring activated partners on your site. 
- CRM integration. 

5. Ongoing engagement and community driven growth. 
- Hosting frequent digital updates (webinars) to showcase new features, success stories, and best practices.
- Creating a slack/social community to allow for peer to peer engagement. 
- QBRs for priority partners. 

6. Optimizing your tech stack. 
- Partner relationship managment software. 
-Learning Management System. 
- Automated demand generation. 

How do we create an activation program that scales as we add more and more partners to our ecosystem?


Countless mistakes can be made. Continue to make them until you've refined your process/approach. 

1. One-size-fits-all approach: All partners are not the same. Prioritize them while tailoring enablement material and offering team support accordingly. 
2. Lack of data/metric-backed goals: Define what success means upfront for both partners. Work together to track while holding one another accountable. 
3. Failure to incentivize partners: Whether it's in the form of rev share, demo bounties, customer introductions, marketing collaboration, or more, you must compensate partners for their advocacy. 
4. Ignoring your partners: frequently collect feedback from partners to define your approach (product, GTM, etc.)
5. Poor communication: make it so it's easy to communicate/inquire with your team. 
6. Not meeting your partners where they are: show up to the events, cities, etc. where your partners are. In person engagements are still exponentially more meaningful than digital ones. 

Deel Senior Manager, Partner Programs, Eduardo Ezbanon Partner Program Strategy