Brett Haralson

This is a good question! There is a difference between marketing with your partners to win together and marketing your partners to increase revenue. It’s very important to never treat your partners as a revenue source. They are your partners - that word is there for a reason. I have seen some programs fall apart when partners begin to feel used. Always remember: They don’t work for you. They have chosen to use you, and they can choose not to use you, too.

TLDR: Ask them, listen, and build what they need. I love this question, but there is no simple answer here because the answer will be different for every organization. The method to discovering this, however, is pretty standard. You need to ask them what they need. They will tell you exactly what they need from your platform to be more successful. The key is to listen and build (within reason) what they are asking for - and also listen to their business workflows. Building what they ask for and gating it behind “joining” the program will give you the best results. Example: The #1 thing that Glide Experts asked for when I first joined Glide was a way to receive revenue sharing for existing Glide users. To give a little context, when I first joined the only way to get revenue was if someone used a sign-up affiliate link. There wasn’t any real way to have revenue sharing for teams that already had a Glide account. So - I built this into Glide, and now if you join the Experts Program you get automatic revenue sharing on teams you join. Long answer - but I hope it helped. ;)

This can be tricky, but very doable. There are many ways to accomplish this, and one of the easiest is leveraging community. If your support uses a specific tool to chat with customers, for example, you could leverage AI to try to answer questions that the community has already answered. Also, usually service partners are usually the first line of defense for your customers and their questions. You can relieve support if you create special levels of support for your partners so they can better support their clients. Enable the partners to field their client's questions where possible.

I couldn't just list 3! Sorry! :D 1: Ask what they want. It’s great to have some ideas, but validate with your partners. Ask them what would be interesting, what do they need to grow their business? What can you do to help them grow? Where are they struggling? If you could change one thing with a magic wand, what would it be? 2: Find your stars. Find your IDEAL partners and create a very close relationship with them. Involve them with everything and start EVERYTHING with them. This is needed for the next one. 3: Create an online community. This is so valuable - I cannot stress this enough. We could have an AMA by itself on how to do it - but this could be the main source of value for your company in the coming years if done correctly. This is important because you want them to connect with each other and provide a feedback loop to you. This is how you guage interest in ideas, have discussions about what you might implement, and a great place to celebrate feature releases to an audience that is as excited about it as you are. 4: Build what they need. I answered this in another question - but this is critical. When you ask what they want, listen. When you announce a feature request that was inspired by them - tell them it was their requests that kicked this into production. Their feedback should be your roadmap - and they NEED to know it. 5: Don’t over-promise. It’s really hard to take a perk away once you’ve given it. Start small - and if you want to increase a perk you can always add it later to a higher tier.

There are a lot of different tools for a partner program and it depends on which aspect or perk of your program you need to enable. There are many tools to provide revenue sharing, like PartnerStack. PartnerPage is a tool you can use to create a marketplace for your partners to get matched with users, for example. You need: -A way to communicate with them. Could be email, could be community, could be both. -A way to execute what you offer them. If you say you are giving a benefit make sure you deliver here and have a way to do it. -A way to track the growth of your partners to measure your success. What are your metrics? What are you looking to accomplish, and what does the finish line look like?