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?

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.