Fancy onboarding workflows, creative co-marketing campaigns, and friendly commission structures are great. But they aren’t critical to your partner program.
What really matters? The partners you have on your roster. The more top-tier companies you partner with, the faster you can generate revenue. But finding and converting those stellar partners is easier said than done.
Many PartnerStack customers dedicated hours to partner sourcing, doing extensive Google searches, scouring competitors’ partner catalogs and talking to customers about the gaps partners could fill — until now.
PartnerStack’s Partner Discovery feature drastically reduces the manual work of partner recruitment, helping you identify, qualify and convert new partners straight from your PRM.
Below, we’ll delve more into the “why” behind Partner Discovery and the benefits B2B SaaS companies of any size can expect to gain from it — with insights from Ajay Bala, Senior Product Manager at PartnerStack.
Why PartnerStack launched Partner Discovery
When Bala’s team began speaking with customers, partner recruitment emerged as a major pain point.
First, there was the question of where to source new potential partners. Customers used a blend of LinkedIn scraping, paid databases and sales intelligence tools to come up with a list, which they augmented with any customer and partner recommendations they had.
Qualifying potential partners
Once they had a concrete list, they had to qualify each potential partner. This involved:
- Determining what product(s) or service(s) the partner offered
- Confirming they serve the right industry
- Gauging customer overlap
- Making an educated guess about pipeline volume and web traffic
Partner outreach and activation
Only then could they start their outreach and nurture activities, which took:
- Determining who the point of contact would be
- Nailing down a solid value prop for the partnership
- Sending emails or LinkedIn messages
- Sending multiple follow-ups and phone calls
As Bala puts it, “We saw this as a huge opportunity to remove a lot of friction and unlock the value of our network data.”
PartnerStack’s robust network of B2B SaaS companies had all the data points customers were looking for in potential partners. They just needed to be served up for them.
See more: Improve partner recruitment with PartnerStack Applications.
Four ways Partner Discovery benefits B2B SaaS partners and vendors
Partner Discovery is a free PartnerStack feature that makes PartnerStack’s Network even more actionable.
Bala explains, “For partners, this means a higher potential to get in front of larger vendors. For vendors, this means pinpointing partners within your ideal partner profile with ease, accelerating your outreach, and validating partner strategies — all in one place.”
Granularity
Not just anyone is accepted into the PartnerStack Network. Beyond gathering high-level company details (description, location, product/services), customers are asked operational questions like:
- What industries do you focus on?
- What sales channels do you use?
- What distributors do you use?
- What types of customers do you work with?
- What is your monthly audience size in terms of traffic?
- What is your preferred commission structure?
The PartnerStack Network team then reviews each application to ensure the submissions that are accepted match the caliber of the existing SaaS businesses in the Network.
Besides preserving the health of the Network, collecting all of this data means we can feed it directly into the Partner Discovery tool. Users can now filter for potential partners based on:
- Headquarters location
- Where they’re approved to do business
- Programs they’re already running
- Commission expectations
- Industry focus
- Audience size
- Blogs, newsletters, events, paid search and other GTM strategies
- PartnerStack ratings to indicate performance
According to Bala, “Searching with this level of granularity ensures you’re spending your time reaching out to companies that will actually drive paying customers and submit high-quality leads, expediting the partner recruitment lifecycle.”
And it benefits partners, too. They know whoever reaches out to them knows what they’re all about.
Efficiency
Because companies take so many different approaches to partner sourcing, partner recruitment is usually conducted outside of a partner relationship management platform (PRM) in messy spreadsheets.
With Partner Discovery, recruitment is embedded in the same centralized location where all other partner metrics are stored. Plus, it has features like flags and email templates, speeding up partner qualification and outreach.
New network badges have also been introduced so that vendors can now see if a partner holds a Top, Rising Star, or Network approved badge, making recruitment all the more efficient.
Related: Playbook to recruiting your first 100 revenue-generating partners.
Strategy
A unique advantage to Partner Discovery is that it can help you predict the success of new partnership GTM tactics. For example, maybe you’re catering to a new industry or expanding to a new regional market.
With the filtering available in Partner Discovery, you can instantly:
- See the number of partners in that space and their performance history
- Filter by multiple "or" sub filters per category
- Exclude categories in order to only go after ideal fit partners
- Filter partners by commission structures
- Search by common geographic locations
- Track when you last contacted a partner
If you don’t see a lot of players or aren’t confident in the potential partners that exist, you can pivot before you’ve already sunk time and money into a failing strategy.
Scalability
As we’ve discussed, most partner teams struggle to form solid lists of prospective partners and that limits their reach.
Partner Discovery has the scale and quality you need. With a network 100,000 B2B partners, you’ve got a wealth of experienced, high-quality partners at your fingertips. And you can now send them 100 requests per week — a whopping 1,300 opportunities to add excellent partners to your roster.
In fact, the average PartnerStack customer adds between 20 to 30 partners to their program within the first month of using Partner Discovery. Bala shares, “Most companies come to PartnerStack to manage and automate their day-to-day partnerships functions. But they stay for the Network — that’s what helps them scale.”
Boost your prospective partner conversion rate
Partner recruitment is a big priority for those working in the space. That’s why Partner Discovery comes completely free in all of PartnerStack plans.
If you’re looking to drive revenue while streamlining your partnerships motion (including recruitment), PartnerStack is the all-in-one PRM for you. See all that it can do here.
And if you’re already a PartnerStack user, Partner Discovery should be a no-brainer. Boost your conversion rate by eight to ten per cent for free — explore Partner Discovery today.
This article was originally published in November 2024.
.jpg)
