What are 3 things to take into consideration in the early stages of your Partner Program?

In the early stages of building a partner program, I’ve found three considerations to be especially important: 1. Clarity of purpose: Why are you building a program in the first place? Are you looking for distribution, product adoption, co-innovation, brand credibility—or some combination? Too often, teams rush to sign partners without a clear thesis. If you can articulate the “why” up front, it becomes much easier to prioritize partner types, resourcing, and success metrics. 2. Partner and customer fit: Not every partner type is right for every stage of your business. The best programs start by aligning to your ICP and identifying partners who can truly add value to those customers. In early days, one or two “lighthouse” partners can prove the motion, generate a story, and light the path for scalable replication. 3. Operational readiness: This one often gets overlooked. It’s not just about having someone to “own” partnerships—it’s about building enough internal infrastructure so that early partners actually succeed. A few examples: Enablement: Can you equip partners with a clear pitch, talk tracks, and assets that make it easy for them to explain your value to customers? Systems & tracking: Do you have a basic way to capture referrals, measure sourced vs. influenced pipeline, and provide visibility back to partners? (Even a simple CRM workflow is better than nothing.) Internal alignment: Are Sales, CS, and Product on board with supporting partners, or will the first few deals get stuck in friction? Starting lean is fine—most programs do—but you need just enough process and accountability to ensure your first partners have a smooth experience. Their success (or frustration) sets the tone for how quickly your program scales.

1. You have to justify your existence - it doesn't matter how much buy-in you have from leadership, or how fluffy your metrics appear to be. If you can't tie outcomes from your work to money coming in to the business, your career security is always out of your hands 2. Focus relentlessly on short-term outcomes. Partnerships is inherently a long-term endeavour. If you put at least 80% of your time into activities that will generate your desired outcomes in the next 3-6 months, then the long term will take care of itself. 3. Everyone is a salesperson. Whether you know your quota or not, you have one. Whether you report to product or sales or marketing or the CEO directly... there is a revenue number that you must contribute to the business. If it doesn't seem that way, it's because no one has done the maths yet - not because the maths doesn't exist.