Is there such a thing as recruiting too many partners? Should recruitment be limited?

Service partners want to see lead flow from you. When there are too many partners they don't feel special and find it hard to stand out which makes them look to partner with your competitors.

In general, I think it's a great thing to have as many partners as possible. But, you need to have the right systems in place to be able to properly scale your program. For example, when we first started our Certified Partner Program at Trainual, we only had 27 partners and maybe took on a few new partners per year. Why? The process was extremely manual to get people as a part of the program. The Certification took 8 hours to do. It required them to go through an interview process. And the whole ordeal took about 3 months (and manual manpower on our end) to get them started. But, what took us to 1000 partners was automating the partner onboarding process as much as possible. Meaning, we created automated email sequences to walk partners through the process, made the Certification shorter and completely asynchronous to earn, and set up automations to give them all of the materials they need along the way. Doing this allowed us to add in more partners without leading to a proportional increase in workload for me. And on top of that, we've seen over 200% revenue growth in partner-generated revenue since we started this. As you do grow your program, even with the right systems in place, you have to be sure you have people in place who are there to support your partnerships team. Whether that means specific partnership hires, having your sales team more involved, etc, more people allows you to add more partners.

Agree with Daniel. I think it is crucial to balance the number of new partners you bring into your ecosystem with the amount of commercial/marketing/product offering you can provide. It is more important to enable your team to work with some top selected partners to build momentum and get lots of value with a select amount of partners, rather than bring in too many and try to spread out activity too thin internally and externally.

There absolutely is a thing as recruiting too many partners, and so many partner programs can get scaled up prematurely especially in high growth companies. I would encourage you to split your time let's say 80/20 on working with existing vs new partners and allocate and dedicate some time and resources to working with new partners. And if you are watching that funnel and setting up joint success plans and you have a good understanding of how to make partners successful, then you need to invest in scaling that up. But be mindful of going too big too fast.