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?

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.

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.

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.