Fewer partners, more revenue

Hi Everyone,

80% of B2B channel and co-marketing partnerships fail. The companies that actually grow through partnerships pick a handful and go deep with each one.

We're sharing how to figure out which of your current partners are actually worth your time and what to do about the rest.

One thing first

This advice is for companies that can already close customers on their own, because partners extend the reach of a working sales process, but won't fix a broken one. Focus on the sales process first if you're still establishing product-market fit or don't have a repeatable way to sell.

Look at your partner list honestly

A Channel Dynamics study of 200+ organizations found that 10–20% of partners generate the bulk of revenue.

Bob Apollo of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, after reviewing that data, said what a lot of partnership leaders already suspect – a few effective partnerships will always outperform a long list of impressive but irrelevant logos.

The inactive ones still cost you, though. Industry-wide, 60% of marketing development funds allocated to partners go unspent. That's before you count the onboarding time and the recurring calls that go nowhere.

Score the ones you have

Pull up your current partner list and run each one through these four questions.

• Have they sent you a qualified lead or closed a deal in the last six months? Two consecutive quarters with nothing means the partnership isn't active.
• Do their customers look like yours? A partner whose buyer base overlaps with your ideal customer profile will send you better leads than a big name selling into a different market.
• Are they investing time? The partners worth keeping show up to joint calls and follow through on introductions. One-sided partnerships don't last.
• Would you refer your own customers to them? Gorgias built their partner program by sending referrals to partners first, before asking for anything back. If you wouldn't send your customers their way, the trust isn't there yet.

The partners that score well across all four deserve more of your time and more co-marketing budget. The ones that score well on none should be deprioritized or dropped entirely.

If you want a place to track this, we made a one-page scoring template. Drop in your partner names, answer the four questions, and the template does the rest.

Access your Partner Scoring Template

Now double down on your top five

Once you've identified your top partners, two things make the biggest difference.

1. Share account-level data so both sides know where your customers overlap: Vidyard, an online video platform with 300–500 employees, saw partner-sourced pipeline grow from $25,000 per quarter to $350,000 after they started mapping accounts with their strongest partners. Their close rate on partner-influenced deals reached 50%.
2. Set a quarterly goal together: Pick a specific number of introductions or joint deals you'll work toward in the next 90 days. Good partnerships drift into inactivity when there's no shared target. Monday.com grew partner-contributed revenue to 23% of new annual recurring revenue partly by feeding partners real sales leads from day one, giving them something concrete to work with rather than just a badge on the partner page.

Go deeper

👉 Inflexion-Point: The 5 Top Reasons Why B2B Partnerships Fail – Bob Apollo's analysis of the Channel Dynamics study, with the most common failure modes ranked by frequency

👉 Andreessen Horowitz: The Importance of Partnerships in the Great Unbundling – a16z's Sarah Wang and Crossbeam's Bob Moore on why the best startups invest in partnerships earlier than you'd expect

👉 PartnerStack Research Lab: Tracking the Growth of Partnerships Revenue – network-level data on how partner-driven revenue performed across mid-market and enterprise SaaS in 2024

👉 Partnership Leaders: The State of Partner Ops and Programs – benchmarks for partner activation rates, team structure, and program maturity across 650+ organizations

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow, we're breaking down what OpenAI got wrong about succession planning and how to avoid the same mistake.

That's it for today! Have a great week.

P.S. If you ran the scoring exercise, what surprised you more – how few partners scored well, or how many you'd been carrying without realizing it?