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

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.

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.