What sort of revenue goals or other goals should I be setting for my service / certified partners program? What does the exec team need to see to know the program is going well and growing?

This is a tough one to answer without more specifics - but I’ll hazard a guess you already know what your exec team cares about this year. It’s probably along the lines of efficiency, effectiveness, profitable growth, defensibility - some or all of the above. So, the closer you can attach to those focus areas in terms of the KPIs you create and manage to, and the targets you set for yourself, the better. And if you’re early stage, it’s super critical to be able to show the progress QoQ and to show that you have a healthy, diverse partner pipeline. If you don’t have a dedicated revops resource, make friends with someone in your revops team ASAP. Buy them coffee and a donut and ask them to show you the ropes on reporting!

We broke our goals up into two parts during the initial ramp-up of our program: we first measured success on NUMBER of partners when we were intially scaling the program. This allowed us to get tons of partners in the door with us, and give us a large pool of partners to work with. And the second part, when we got a large number of partners, was focusing on NEW revenue referred by partners. This allowed us to focus on the key relationships within our partner pool and revenue-generating activities to help us get new business. Of course, you always want to keep this in mind throughout even the early phases of your program. But because the revenue won't always come incredibly quickly when it comes to partnerships (we all know its a long game!) getting more partners under your belt to start the relationships can help to give you a good base to start going after the revenue once its go-time. In regards to that second part of the question, the two biggest numbers that I like to report on are: 1. New recurring revenue generated by partners 2. % of total new MRR generated by partners That first one clearly shows that your partnership efforts are leading to new business for your company. And if you show that number is growing and is at a healthy clip, then you'll easily get the eyes of the exec team. But, I would argue that second number is more important. Because if you can show that a large portion of your MRR is coming from partners, and that the proportion of that number is growing, then your team is going to want to invest in partnerships more heavily because it is a growing part of the total new MRR.