Your Guide to Determining Who Gets Credit for a Co-Sell Deal

Here’s a brain teaser for you:

A partner invites your sales team to a happy hour at an industry conference. One of your reps ends up seated next to a highly qualified lead. They get to talking, then a partner rep joins the conversation, realizing the lead could benefit from both solutions. A few months later, that lead signs with both companies.

So, who gets the credit for your deal?

From your rep’s perspective, the partner didn’t have much to do with the sale of your product. They followed up, handled objections and negotiated for your software. It was their deal.

But from your perspective, the partner clearly played a role. Without the invite, the rep may not have even met the lead. Plus, the lead may not have been as receptive without the partner’s endorsement — even if the partner wasn’t involved in every step (and got a closed deal themselves).

Co-sell attribution questions like this come up all the time in SaaS partnerships. And if credit isn’t clearly defined, you risk alienating both your sales team and your partners.

So in this article, we’ll review the various flavors of co-selling, how B2B companies handle partner attribution and what you can do to prevent internal and external channel conflict as your program grows — with expert help from Sean Harris, Senior Director of Product at PartnerStack.

How does co-selling happen?

Integration partners and agency or consulting partner programs are most often associated with co-selling. But Harris likes to think of co-sell more like a natural progression of partnerships:

1. You may have a straight referral program to start

An agency sends over a referral, then your internal reps sell it. “We see this a lot in burgeoning eComm or martech companies that form relationships with agencies,” Harris points out.

Though it’s not a full co-sell motion, partners will often give some clues as to what, exactly, the end customer might be looking for, what features would be best to mention and who would be best to talk to.

2. Next, you might dip your toes into joint selling

Partner reps join prospect calls with your sales reps, and they work together to get mutual deals over the finish line. For example, you and an integration partner might co-sell your complementary software products. Or, you and a consulting partner might sell your software and their implementation package.

Companies often use co-sell tools like Crossbeam to surface shared prospects and customers in each partner’s CRM. Some use Clay to enrich that data and uncover warm paths into the account, like shared champions, prior tool usage or even references to a specific problem they could solve with your joint solution in company 10-Ks or executive podcast appearances.

See more: The co-sell tech stack that enterprise teams actually use in 2025.‍

3. Then, you start to form reseller partnerships

Even though a partner is selling your product on their own — and the deal may even be on their paper — you might still step in for especially big deals.

“You’re going to want to help them in whatever way you can, because it could be a huge new logo for you. So, you end up working with the partner to get that deal over the finish line,” Harris shares.

Why attribution gets complicated in co-selling

Eventually, you might have scenarios where all three evolutions of partnerships come into play.

“Some of PartnerStack’s biggest vendors have programs with multi-partner attribution. An affiliate partner drives a referral, another partner closes the deal and then a third partner ends up servicing it,” Harris says.

With so many parties involved, determining who gets what can get thorny — fast. A common way for SaaS companies to think about partner attribution and rep commission is to split deals into partner-sourced revenue and partner-influenced revenue.

Partner-sourced revenue 

Sourced revenue comes from leads that partners submit directly to you through a referral. Alternatively, a partner could find a potential customer themselves, then bring you in to co-sell.

Commission setup: Since you wouldn’t have had access to these leads without a partner’s help, partners tend to share payouts with internal sales teams.

Partner-influenced revenue 

Influenced revenue comes from indirect partner contributions. The example we discussed in the introduction — a partner invites your internal sales team to an event where they connect with a qualified lead that they ultimately close — could be considered influenced revenue. Partners may also recommend your product to their clients.

Commission setup: Though these activities don’t have a direct impact on the sales cycle, deals may not have closed without the partner’s credibility or exposure. So while reps take home a larger share of the compensation on partner-influenced deals, partners will still receive a small portion.

Other variants

Even within the partner-sourced and partner-influenced structures, there’s usually some variability. 

For example, a partner who refers a deal (partner-sourced revenue) tends to get lower compensation than a partner who co-sells a deal with you (also partner-sourced revenue). “Remember, for the referring partner, the commission is a nominal amount compared to what they earn running their services. They’re referring because they want you to reciprocate in the future. In a co-sell deal, both parties are in it for the long haul,” Harris explains. 

A partner who briefly mentions your solution on a sales call (partner-influenced revenue) tends to get lower compensation than a partner who asks you to speak at an event (which could also lead to partner-influenced revenue). A passing reference just doesn’t carry the same weight with prospects as being featured as a special guest.‍

‍Related: What is co-selling in a partner ecosystem (and how can you do it?).

If it’s so complex, why do companies still co-sell?

At this point, you might be thinking, ‘If it’s this hard to pull off, why do companies even bother co-selling?’ Because:

It expands your reach

Partners can get you into deals you never would’ve been able to get into before. “Most agencies aren’t working with super small businesses, so if you’re trying to sell to the enterprise, co-sell deals are the way to go,” Harris points out.

We can’t name names, but at PartnerStack, many top customers are driving a huge percentage of their enterprise business through co-selling. In some cases, partners are bringing in so much pipeline that vendors are spending less on marketing. Their partners have built entire practices around selling their product.

See more: Read revenue-driving partnerships in action with real-world case studies.

It drives efficiency

Agency and consulting partners in particular aren’t just helping you sell, they’re supporting some other function, like onboarding and implementing as well. And if they don’t do it right, their reputation is on the line.

As a result, partners tend to build rapport in the account and can be extremely useful when it comes time for a renewal or an upsell opportunity arises.

How to set up co-sell deals for success

Co-selling has significant upsides, but getting it right requires alignment, clarity and the right systems in place from the start. Here’s how to set yourself up for success:

Only co-sell when it makes sense

It’s easy to assume that the only reason partners refer, co-sell or resell is because they are compensated. But if that’s the case, what’s stopping them from partnering with competitors who will compensate them, too?

“If you’re thinking about partnering with agencies and consulting firms, you have to remember that they’re building their business around specific tools. So if you can’t uniquely differentiate your product from a competitor’s and articulate how you’re going to help their customers, you won’t be part of their business,” says Harris.

That differentiation is important when partnering with integrators, too, but there’s another element to consider: timing.

“If the end customer isn’t evaluating your product and your partner’s product at a similar time in the buying cycle, it’ll be much more of a one-way partnership. If a customer is purchasing your product and then purchasing another product after, you might send a partner business, but they won’t necessarily send you business because the customer may have already purchased a product like yours,” Harris emphasizes.

“But if it’s the opposite, you’re in for an amazing partnership. The combination is mutually beneficial because the customer needs both of them to succeed.”

Tier your compensation

As you scale, you need to start thinking about clear mechanisms of compensation. Typically, the more value partners deliver across the lifecycle, the more they earn.

Consider setting up a structure to:

• Only award flat fees for partner-sourced or influenced deals and give the remaining commission to your internal sellers.
• Offer a higher rev share to partners who manage the account or provide support implementation post-sale.
• Give additional incentives to partners who drive ongoing usage or generate their own upsell opportunities.

Use tools to help you track

Partner attribution reporting is tough because there are so many ways things can slip through the cracks. Harris recalls chatting with one company whose partner sent a referral over email, but because it wasn’t formally logged as a partner-sourced deal in their PRM or CRM, all the credit went to the internal sales rep.

“They had to go to their finance team and do a retroactive pull-back on the rep’s comp to pay the partner. Messing with people’s money is a really, really bad experience,” he warns.

To avoid a circumstance like that, you could add steps to your final deal attribution review, like:

• Looking in Crossbeam to see which deals might have had partner input and retroactively tag it as partner-sourced or partner-influenced if necessary.
• Using Clay to validate whether a partner truly influenced a deal through social media or another channel.

Or, you could use one of PartnerStack’s AI-powered features to automate the process. More on that below.

Identify referrals from Slack using PartnerStack

If you and your partners have a Slack Connect workspace, you can log leads discussions as co-sell opportunities or referrals, and the AI agent will create a corresponding record in PartnerStack (that can then also sync to your CRM).

Parse referral emails

If you receive an introductory email and want to log it as a partner referral, you can forward it to track@partnerstack.com. PartnerStack’s AI agent will pull relevant information into your referral record fields and follow up to confirm submission. If any info is missing, the system will prompt you to send more.

Send referrals through the HubSpot app

If a partner is working a deal, they can send a referral directly to your company without leaving their CRM using PartnerStack’s HubSpot Connect app.

Co-selling doesn’t have to be complicated

The more transparent and repeatable your attribution model, the easier it is to align your sales and partner teams and turn co-selling into a competitive advantage.

Want to see how PartnerStack can help you track and measure partner and sales involvement at every stage of every deal? Book a demo to see our AI agent in action.