Technology partner

Milestones can vary wildly from program to program. Factors include KPI, the size of the ISV/Tech partner, growth rates, how deeply integrated the solution into the platform or sales cycle, platform complexity, customer type, etc. That said, I have seen quite a few programs with initial partner milestones ranging from 10 - 100 connections. 

These lower ranges make “unlocking” basic program benefits attainable and are likely to encourage partners to continue moving towards the next milestones. You will also get to see how quickly some partners blow past these milestones… keep an eye on those folks. They may be killer partners for scaling. Only time will tell the long term value of those connections. The next milestones you see are typically gated at 250 - 500 connections, 1K connections, 5K+ connections. Again this varies quite a bit.  

Beyond that I generally take the following approach to setting goals: 

If possible, I like to get an average [insert your specific metric here :) ] partners drive in their first month/quarter/year and beyond. Then I use these averages to tailor goals towards partners within these specific buckets. 

Otherwise, I take a look at my KPI and determine how much revenue/LTV lift/new connections I need to hit that goal within a certain time frame. Next I determine a realistic rate for that KPI based on relevant existing data — this could be industry data, your company’s average conversion rate, or ARPU for example. Then I would calculate the average number of connections per partner I would need to hit that goal. 

The leads and pipeline that both partners refer to each other are a valuable metric to keep track of. Towards that goal, some initial milestones can be generation of joint solutions, case studies, and articulating the value of the combined solution vs. other offerings. 

Kicking off right an integration partnership is crucial. The two tech teams should connect and have a relationship. Communication is key thus sometimes its better to not just have email but incorporate more timely slack or other ways. 

Some important steps: 
1) Once partnership is signed, there should be an organized kick-off call to discuss partner timelines and resources for integration, partnership goals and an MVP launch. 

2) During API integration work, partners generally have many questions and like to A/B test the integration. This is where the tech teams need to be directly in touch and work together. As an insurtech, we enable partners with our expertise in going live with the product and use cases to help them from other parnterships. 

3) GTM goals and live date: before going live, QA testing and the MVP have been done and the partnership is ready to go public. This can be helped with PR as well. At this stage sales enablement (email templates, support staff being ready, FAQs created) is important as a lot of questions will come through from customers. 

4) Funnel metrics: it is often important to discuss with partner how they open up their top of funnel customers, what % or regions we target with insurance integration. A phased approach to slowly see adoption and work out kinks helps a lot with API partnerships and helps drive revenue in a strategic, slowly increased funnel manner. 

I love this one. A few different ways you can approach it and adjust goals over time. Here’s a “menu”:

1. Adoption & Activation Milestones

A. Set a target for the number of customers who activate the integration within a specific timeframe (e.g., 30, 60, 90 days).
B. Track the percentage of customers who successfully onboard and use the integration.
C. Monitor how frequently customers are using the integration features.

2. Sales & Revenue Milestones

A. Establish a target for the number of joint sales opportunities created within a specific period.
B. Set initial revenue goals for the integrated solution, share these revenue goals between both companies.
C. Set targets for how many of each company's customers are utilizing the other company’s product.

What milestones or initial goals are good ones to set up for ISV partners after they complete and integration and become an official partner?

Some metrics to track partner adoption are partner sourced net new revenue and partner influenced revenue. If you are seeing these metrics are performing well with certain partners, it's a good indication that you have successfully enabled that partner to sell your offering. As well as your ICP’s are aligned and customers are seeing the value of both of your services. You must track metrics for all your partners as each one of them will have different goals established. 


If you are looking to measure how well your partners are performing, take a look at revenue they produce for you, # of deals, average deal size, # of sales reps within the partner that are selling your solution (ie partner penetration), and those downsteam partners that produce (if that’s applicable). If a partner brought you one deal a quarter, ask what it would take to get 1 a month? How can you co-invest in your joint success? You still have to figure out the ROI of that channel to measure its effectiveness over other channels/partnerships you invest in. It’s also important to understand how much revenue your solution represents to the partner. Depending on the type of partner, a good rule of thumb is to be 10% of the partners’ business. If you don’t make up 10% of their revenues they may not care as much about having a strategic partnership. Make sure you understand why the partner should sell it? Why should they care? What does it help them solve? Does your solution represent a larger deal, better solution, stickier solution to help with retention? Those answers and creating an ideal partner profile (IPP) will inform how you want to GTM and which partners to pursue. Create a scorecard so you can evaluate your partnerships on an ongoing basis. With the strategic partners, agree upon KPIs that you measure together and meet on a consistent basis to ensure you are both meeting or exceeding those expectations. 

Number of mutual case studies 
Number of mutual clients with partnership use cases set up 
Number of introductions into clients made / Closed ARR 
Number of stakeholders involved 
Number of enablement sessions run 


This is a good one. Just did a presentation on it the other day:

Marketing Reach & Acquisition
- Partner-sourced Cost per Customer Acquisition (CAC)
- Volume of partnerships content
- Audience expansion
- Addressable market reach & LTV potential

CS Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Retention of partner-sourced accounts vs. non
- Retention of accounts with integrations vs. non
- Integration usage vs. LTV
- NPS vs. LTV

Sales Net New & Expansion Revenue
- Sourced net new revenue
- Average Sales Price (ASP) of partner-sourced deals
- Close rate of partner-sourced deals
- Influenced revenue of non-sourced deals
- ARR by Partner/Integration
- Cross-sell expansion revenue




I’m going to be very unhelpful here and answer this question with a question 🙂

The answer to this is going to depend on what you mean by ‘performing’ - what does mean for your business? And does this differ based on partner type?

For example - you might want to set up and track one set of KPIs to measure how the adoption of implementation partner services impacts on your customers’ time-to-value, and their eventual renewal and expansion rates. From this, you can start to form a view on which partner services are most impactful, and where you need to build partner capacity to maximize that impact.

You could also take this same approach with technology partners and measure these metrics based on a specific integration, or combination of integrations.

Or, you might want to track revenue impact more explicitly - ie tracking revenue growth that is directly related to or correlated with adoption of a specific integration. 

As with all KPIs - the best first step is to take a step back, and understand the 'why' behind the KPI, before setting it! 


Consider the end-to-end adoption funnel. 

- Top of funnel: app installs/auths
- Middle of funnel: varies depending on the use case. Track events that show an intent or attempt to use the integration. 
- Bottom of funnel: DAU, successful "runs"



Try not to overcomplicate at first, and iterate as you go:
Start simple: Leads, new customer adds, revenue generated through rev share agreements, and integration adoption.

Iterate to:
Partner-Sourced Leads: Leads generated through the partner’s network or co-marketing efforts. This measures the partner’s contribution to pipeline growth.

Partner Co-Marketing Performance Metrics: Email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and event attendance for partner-related campaigns. This tracks the success of joint marketing initiatives.

Partner Contribution to Customer Retention: Percentage of customers retained due to partner solutions (to paint the strategic value of the partnership)


Getting further into the weeds:
Upsell or Cross-Sell Conversion Rate: Percentage of customers adopting the integration who subsequently purchase additional products or services. Formula: (Number of Additional Purchases from Integration Users / Total Integration Users) × 100 which demonstrates the potential for growth through partner offerings.

Churn Rate for Integrated Customers: Percentage of customers who stop using your product, with a comparison between integrated and non-integrated users. Lower churn rates among integrated users often indicate the value of the integration (pro tip: partner sourced leads are usually, and should be, lower than direct sources leads. Highlight this to your CFO!)

Support Tickets Related to Integration: Number and frequency of customer support inquiries regarding the integration. High numbers could indicate friction or usability issues.

Onboarding Completion Rate: Percentage of users who complete onboarding after adopting the integration.

Formula: (Users Who Complete Onboarding / Total Enabled Users) × 100. This reflects the effectiveness of your enablement resources.

Integration Downtime: Frequency and duration of issues affecting the integration’s functionality. This measures reliability and its impact on customer trust.

Other peripheral things to track: 
Customer CSAT w/integration
NPS
TTV aka Time-to-Value - The average time it takes for a customer to see the expected benefit after enabling the integration. Shorter TTV reflects the ease of use and immediate value of the integration.

There’s always going to be the straight revenue attribution KPI’s to focus on like 
- Deal registrations 
- Partner sourced qualified pipeline
- Partner influenced revenue 

Other KPI’s can be:
- Partner marketing leads
- Amount of sales enablement sessions
- Partner portal engagement, track how often they’re logging in and engaging with content 
-      Partner meetings per week (How many times are you meeting with AEs to discuss accounts)

These KPI’s can help with your partner matrix and understand who your top tier partners are and where to focus your time and efforts on. 

8 Metrics That Actually Matter for Measuring Partner Adoption

As your partner ecosystem grows, measuring how well partners are adopting your program is critical, not just to track performance, but to guide where to invest and scale. The challenge? Most teams measure vanity metrics. What you need are KPIs that tie directly to revenue, readiness, and long-term partner success.

Here’s the framework I use to measure real partner adoption:

1. % of Activated Partners
How many of your onboarded partners have closed at least one deal in the last 90 days? This is your fastest signal of traction and engagement.

2. Pipeline Contribution
What portion of your total pipeline is sourced or influenced by partners? Adoption without pipeline is just noise, this tells you who’s actively driving business.

3. Partner-Sourced Revenue
Closed-won revenue sourced directly by partners, tracked monthly or quarterly. This is your north star for true partner-led growth.

4. Deal Registration Velocity
How fast are partners moving from deal registration to actual opportunity creation? This helps flag friction or enablement gaps early.

5. Partner Enablement Completion Rate
What % of your partners have completed training or certification tracks? Higher rates = more confident and productive partners.

6. Active Partner Rate
Are partners logging into the portal, engaging with sales tools, or attending enablement sessions? Track weekly/monthly activity to catch dormant accounts before they go cold.

7. Win Rate on Partner-Sourced Deals
Are your partners bringing in qualified deals? This metric reflects how well they understand your ICP and pitch your value.

8. Avg. Deal Size vs. Direct
Are partner-led deals smaller, larger, or equivalent to direct deals? This tells you whether partners are helping move upmarket—or just landing transactional wins.



When tracked together, these metrics give you a clear picture of not just partner adoption, but the health, ROI, and scalability of your entire channel program.

What are some KPI's you would recommend for us to track to understand how well our partner adoption is performing?

Some* factors to consider:

- Use case of a possible integration and what value it can provide to existing customers and new prospects.
- What gap does the partner fill in our product. Are we going to build anything similar internally?
- What overlap do we have from an ICP, revenue, region and account perspective?
- Is this tech partner relevant just from a product perspective or can it be used to help co-sell, co-market or assist with retention of existing customers?

Always important to find the healthy balance of variety tech partners with similar services/value. e.g. partner with a variety of QA tools at the start but too many. Too many options can spread partner momentum too thin and can act as a blocker for your internal team to feel confident selling partners within their roles (choice overload/paralysis).

What partners can provide value to what your customers need? What tech partners can fill gaps where your product is weaker or missing? It depends on your business and product strategy and that will determine where tech partners come into play. 

Tech partners are inherently different from affiliate or reseller partners (often referred to as channel). While co-selling and referrals will come from tech partnerships, think about the core need that's coming from your customers, your target audience, which audiences you want to reach 1-3-5 years from now etc that a tech partnership can solve. This is also thinking about your partnerships proactively and in an outbound mindset. If you have an open API and provide support to developers, you'll find that there's also the opportunity for inbound integrations being built and your own business being that central node in the ecosystem. 

Which ecosystems does it make sense based on your customer pain points and business opportunity to be a part of? What type of ecosystem could your business lead or be a central node in?

The short answer is: align partner selection around your ideal customers, IPP, and KPI.

When I am identifying potential partners for outreach I first build a list while considering the following: 

Reviews of specific tools your customers use outside of your platform 
The personas/or use cases your company serves most effectively. What tools/platforms are these folks using? What workflows could be streamlined with an integration?

As the program grows take a step back and look at the types of tools your successful customers use (ie CRMs, Website Builders, Communications Tools, Hardware, Sales Automation). Find all the major players within these areas.

Once I have an initial list together I begin to gather information to evaluate each potential partner’s alignment with my team’s mission, values, and goals. I use a simple scorecard that has each of the IPP characteristics and requirements outlined — each value is weighted based on its importance to the team. Willingness and ability to build are line items on this scorecard by the way. The higher the total score, the more tightly aligned that prospect is to our partnerships program. More highly aligned partners are the relationships that are typically more likely to succeed, so they are prioritized for further exploration.  

It is valuable to review these evaluation metrics from time to time … things change after all. Also, take a look back at existing partners and determine which partners are helping you meet goals consistently. Find or grow more of these partners.

This depends on what we are seeing in the field. I think we all tend to gravitate towards partnering with the most popular tech apps, thinking that those partnerships will naturally bring in more business because they are deemed the "most used" apps, but that isn't always the case when it comes to what you find within your customer base's tech stack. I tend to try to document the types of tools found in our customer's tool box, figure out what those tools could possibly connect those tools to, and then partner with those companies.

I would look at: what customers are requesting for integrations, what product features are missing from your product and could be filled by partners, what the partner is willing to invest technically, what the partner is willing to invest on the GTM side, what the partner is willing to invest to support and upgrade the integration, the quality of the partner product, the number of shared customers, the number of shared prospects, and the cultural and brand overlap with the partner.  

I look at a few things:

- How many customers does the partner have? How many people on their email list/social channels. This is basically getting a sense of their reach and how established they are in the market.
- How many joint customers do we have? Who is their audience? Are they aligned with ours?
- Do they have access to marketing resources? Do they speak in a similar voice and tone as us?
- How do they approach building integrations? Security? Updates and support?
- What is their vision for the future of their business? Where are they going?
- Why should we prioritize this partner? Is their solution/integration something our customers are asking for?

This will give you a really good sense of the partner and how you might work together.

Easy: are there joint customers? If yes, who and how many? 

Over the past 3 years, I've found this to be the single biggest determiner for the success of a partnership. "Build it and they will come" can work, but it's a gamble. You want assurance that when you build the integration, somebody will use it.

Similar for service partners and agencies: if they have happy joint customers, it means they 
a) know how to provide services for your product
b) likely have a lot more customers who fit your ICP. 

Tools like Crossbeam and Reveal allow you to measure customer overlap before you commit to an integration. Joint customers are table stakes. 

I was responsible for selecting Grammarly's first-ever technology partners. I applied the product prioritization framework "RICE" to this process. 

Here's how I made it work for partnerships: 

- Reach: What is the partner's audience (# customers)? Will they support us with co-marketing to expand our reach? 
- Impact: Does the partner's audience fit with our ICP? Does working with the partner unlock valuable new functionality for our customers?
- Confidence: How confident are we that we can get this partnership over the finish line?
- Effort: What is the level of effort to get this off the ground? Do we need to build an integration? How complex is it?

Adding quantifiable scores to these indicators made prioritizing the most impactful partners easy, and using a familiar framework made it easy to align with product leadership and stakeholders. 

Curating a portfolio of technology partners really comes down to customer experience. Are these prospective partners enriching your customers' experience, or are they just creating noise and distraction? Your customers should be able to look at your directory of technology partners and understand immediately why you have partnered with them.

By choosing to partner with a technology platform, you are telling your customers "We think this partnership will create a better experience for you, and we fully support this partnership," so you need to make sure that's actually true. Having a desirable logo in your partner directory is nice, but if it creates a confusing or broken customer experience, it could do more harm than not having the partnership at all.  

First, decide what you want to accomplish with tech partners. What are your product and business goals and how can partners contribute? 

Partners can fill gaps or extend functionality and personalization that your own team doesn’t plan to address directly. For example, communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are useful integrations for Figma users because notifications and conversations about work are happening within those platforms. These integrations engage a broad audience, extend collaboration workflows, and help direct users back into Figma’s platform. 

Great tech partners can also help accelerate or provide access to a new user base. When Figma launched Dev Mode, our new product for developers, it was important for us to partner with tools that developers already know and love, like GitHub, VSCode, Jira, and Linear. Meeting developers in the tools they’re already using helps create a tighter connection between their design and development workflows. 

Tech partnerships won’t flourish without a clear value proposition for each partner and the intended users; it’s important to be explicit about your own goals, your partners’ goals, and the value you create for users together. 


It's not just about finding a company with the right technology, it's about finding a partner that aligns with your goals and values. First make sure you’ve defined your needs and clearly articulated what you're looking for in a technology partner. 

Here are some questions I like to ask:

- Does the partner's technology and expertise complement your existing offerings and support your overall business strategy?

- Does the partner's target market align with yours?

- Will the partnership help you reach new customers or expand existing accounts?

- Can the integration be achieved seamlessly?

- Are they responsive and easy to work with?


I think its always important to have input from other parts of the business or certainly have a clear view on what some other areas of the business would like to see from a partnership. For example, if you are recruiting technology partners be sure to understand what your product roadmap looks like, what some of the technology dependents might be in a typical client set up and what factors, such as data feeds or connectors, are able to enhance your offering. The product teams will have a good view on this and also know what is being considered from a roadmap perspective – don’t recruit what you are about to build.
You can also get feedback from customer/product teams on what existing customers most ask for in terms of complimentary functionality or if you are recruiting agencies – who are the agencies in and around the projects that your technology enables.
All of this information helps you build an IPP (Ideal Partner Profile) which you can use to map potential partners against. An IPP can be created using the info above and some basic company profiling and go as deep as you want it to go. I think that an IPP is a constantly evolving profile that gets better over time. For example, you may have one or two really successful partnerships that display certain traits relating to culture, org structure, branding - these are things that its hard to predict but you learn as you build an ecosystem so always revisit the IPP and add to it.
If you need a place to start, work it back from the company ICP, you should be targeting partners that have a similar target customer profile and can add some basic info on what type of characteristics a partner should have that can drive value from working with you


How do you choose which technology partners are a good fit for your business?

To expand a little bit on my earlier question - they’re going to care most about demonstrable impact your team is having, that’s clearly aligned with wider business priorities.

So be prepared to dig in and show up as a strong driver of new business growth and/or existing business expansion and retention.

But, in addition to that, being able to show comparative impact versus other channels on things like win rate and deal size, as well as team metrics like productivity, is really crucial. 


At SmartSuite, it's pretty straight forward:

MRR/ARR impact.
Number of trails and conversions.    

We try to attribute partnerships to rev as closely as possible.

Direct revenue attribution is king; as a partner leader I always want to own a P&L and contribute to revenue directly. That can take the form of resell, referral or distribution partnerships.
The more direct the line to revenue is, the easier it is to make the case for additional spend.
Of course, there are many partner programs you will need to build that don't directly source revenue - but those need to be supporting the overall revenue motion. For example, building a program that sub-contracts consulting partners into your sales engagements doesn't bring significant revenue on its own; however it feeds business to the partners which in turn makes it much easier to ask for referrals and intros from them.

Metrics will differ based on your partnership team’s goals (see notes above on metrics like total user engagement, influenced revenue, etc.). Demonstrating quantifiable impact that aligns with stated company goals is most important here, coupled with clear customer stories and examples that back up the value of your partner program. A good exercise here is to take materials that outline your company’s goals and overlay your partner program’s contribution(s) to each relevant area. 

You also want to be clear on the expected outcome from an increased investment in partner budget; if partner budget is increased, what can leaders expect and why does that matter to them? Be clear and realistic on the upside, downside, and risks associated with increasing partner spend. 


ROI  ROI  ROI   The key here is to reasonably account for the contributions made by partners....the big discussion is 'sourced versus influenced'.  However, when you find teams fighting more about attribution and action, you've hit a breaking point.

"Lifetime value of a customer" maximizes the value of a partner ecosystem.

•	Revenue Attribution: Track partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline and closed-won revenue by quarter.

•	Integration Adoption & Retention Impact: Show how integrations correlate with renewal rates, upsell, or TTV improvement.

•	Campaign ROI & Ecosystem Coverage: Demonstrate efficiency of co-marketing and strategic value in plugging product gaps.


What metrics are top of mind for executives and leadership teams when deciding to increase spend on partner budget?

Winning over top-tier SaaS partners requires a program that stands out with undeniable value, seamless collaboration, and a distinct competitive edge. 

1. Unique Financial/Economic Benefits.
- Offer a higher recurring revenue share with possibly a longer payout. 
- Tiered incentives. 
- Make your payouts fast and transparent. Are monthly payouts possible? 
- Spiffs/bonuses for expediting deal flow. 

2. Superior enablement and support. 
- Frictionless onboarding and training. 
- Dedicated partner success team. 
- Personalized marketing and sales assets. 

3. Exclusive access and VIP perks. 
- Early bird access to new features and functionality. 
- Partner only community and networking. 
- Access to APIs and opportunity for integrations. 
- Slack channels? Direct access to PM cell phone? 

Always engage with partners to understand what they value most and how competitor offerings stack up. Tailor your offerings accordingly. 


I do not have a perfect answer for this but i do think that one of the most important factors when designing a Partner program is to think about it from the perspective of a Customer. 
If your customers find it really easy to differentiate between your Partners, find the right Partner to meet the challenge that they have and they have confidence in how you are categorising your Partners then that is usually the type of program that Partners want to be a part of. 
Making the program relevant to the wider industry and not just your ecosystem also helps make the program something that a Partner will promoter being a part of, an example would be to use industry terminology over your product terminology or make it clear how the two are the same.

- Any partner program should be seen as an offering to which the partner is a customer. Hence a clearly defined value propostion and articulation of that is a critical first step.
- Provide simple and easy to udnerstand growth path. Partners should be able to understand how to grow from a tier to another. And it's easy to operationalize too.
- Design and provide enablement that stays. Byte sinze information, access to it whenever they want, access to sandbox environments and demos as necessary. This all makes the life easier for the partners as they may have 10s of other platforms to work with as well.
- Partner Portal is a key tool to provide one window experience to all the partners. Layer it up with access to lead registration, MDF workflows along with dashboards for sales/renewals, marketing, learning and certifications, etc. Important templates and announcements could go in there too.
- Think of interactions between all your partners. Community for partners could be a strong platform for gaining and keeping the mindshare with them. Very important! Also, do manage the interactions and curate as necessary.
- Always check what the success metrics for the partners are and how you have been and will continue to contribute to those. Business environments evolve rapidly and it's important to stay relevant to the partner's success. Stay maniacally focused on delivering a simple, consistent, and remarkable partner experience.
- Evolve your partner program as your offerings, GTM approaches, partner's expectations, etc. evolve. Partner programs are never launch once and forget.

Some things that have worked for us and generated one of the most powerful ecosystems in our space are:

- Partner-specific support SLAs

- Regular scalable communication (newsletter, quarterly partner update webinars with sr. leadership) and award ceremonies to celebrate successes and build more credibility around the expertise of your partners

- Valuable certification training with badges that increase the person’s value and strengthen your partner’s credibility 

- Be partner-first and offer product extensibility so partners can build on top of your platform

- Include partners in your company strategy (include them in thought-leadership pieces, make them part of your own events, co-present at conferences, invite them to your kick-off, run partner advisory boards… anything you do as a company, you should think, how do I include partners in this)

- Offer powerful Marketing Development Funds that incentivize partners to reinvest the gained budget into very targeted GTM activities to grow the joint partnership even further

How do we differentiate our partner program from competitors to attract top-tier partners?

The number one thing I look for when qualifying a new partner is their customers. Who are their customers, how many do they have and do they fit our ICP.

After that, we would look at their services offering, their other partners (do they fit with our ecosystem, do they work with competitors), their size to understand capacity and when we speak to them we would want to understand their commitment to this partnership (are they agnostic and we would be one of many and they are only looking at us because a customer was asking or did they make a strategic choice on our product(s) and want to go all in).

A non-negotiable is when a partner signs up but does not invest in learning, account mapping etc. and just expects leads. Such a partnership will not work out.

Yellow.ai Director, Channel Sales Americas, Michael Schulmanon Partner Program Strategy

What are some KPI's you would recommend for us to track to understand how well our partner adoption is performing?

How do you choose which technology partners are a good fit for your business?

What milestones or initial goals are good ones to set up for ISV partners after they complete and integration and become an official partner?

How do we differentiate our partner program from competitors to attract top-tier partners?

What metrics are top of mind for executives and leadership teams when deciding to increase spend on partner budget?

What’s the number one thing you look for in a partner when you're recruiting? What are your non-negotiables?