Wesley: Hello and welcome to the Partner Strategy Network podcast. I'm Wesley Coelho and I'm here with Mark Sochan. Hey mark. How you doing?
Mark: Okay Wesley, how are you doing today?
Wesley: Doing Well. Today, we're going to be talking about partner development metrics. So how can you track your progress on partner development? And let's start with the basics.
So, Mark, what is the main thing you want to measure about your partners?
Mark: Well, of course, it's all about revenue, revenue, revenue, Wesley. The official scorecard for how well your partner program is all about the revenue.
Wesley: Makes sense. And there's lots of flavors of revenue. So what is the right kind of revenue?
Mark: For most software companies there are two kinds of partner opportunities, there's partner influenced deals and partner sourced deals. The partner influence deals are the ones where you had the initial lead and you involved a partner who was supporting you. But much more valuable is the scenario where the partner actually sourced the sales opportunity or lead.
So you don't want to muddy the water by combining influence metrics with their measurement of the amount of partners, source deals. It's hard to quantify the value of that influence. And it's easy to say that almost every deal is influenced by a partner in some way. So at the end of the day, it's the net new business brought by the partner that is the most valuable.
Wesley: say you've got a partner sourced deal and it's the right type of revenue in the way that you described it. Does it matter if the partner resold the business or if it was just a referral to you?
Mark: Not really. I mean, either form a revenue sourced by a partner is good. In most cases, you'll want to choose the path of least friction for a given customer. The net you receive on the dealer should be fully counted as partner sourced revenue.
Wesley: Okay. Got it. So now let's say you're launching your partner program or you're targeting a brand new type of partner. And at this stage, you just don't have a lot of hard revenue yet to track. What are some of the ways that you can track your part in development progress towards that?
Mark: there's lots of really important interim metrics to be tracking with the first one being of course, counting new partnership deals signed. But after that, the second thing that you'd want to count, and track, is how many individuals within each partner have been trained and enabled.
And that tracking of training of the salespeople, as well as training of technical people, including pre-sales and services individuals, a third measurement and really important is measuring the joint partner marketing activities. This is, the joint webinars you're doing the email blast blog posts, trade shows, et cetera.
So important to be able to generate lots of new leads together. And then as the leads and opportunities start to flow in, you want to measure the number of deals registered and the total dollar value of that partner sales pipeline. And you can also track the growth of that partner sales pipeline over time.
Hopefully it's growing. And at this point we come full circle and we track the number and revenue from closed partner sourced deals.
Wesley: Great tips, Mark. And I liked the way that you spell out the progression of what to measure as your partner program begins in its infancy, and then begins to mature getting all the way up to this gold standard of partner sourced closed one revenue. For more information, please subscribe to the podcast and come join the discussion at the Partner Strategy Network LinkedIn group.