The process of enabling and mobilizing the partners you've recruited to perform valuable activities for your business (e.g. sharing a link, making a referral, or closing a deal.) Many programs will define partners as “active” as soon as they’ve made a single successful referral or sale, but this can vary by program, so it’s worth figuring out what determines whether a partner is truly active in your program.

Your program’s activation rate is the percentage of partners that sign up for your program that show actual activity after signing up.

An affiliate link is a unique link assigned to an affiliate partner by a partner program. When someone clicks on the link, that click is attributed to the affiliate partner. If the person that clicks the link later converts (for example, by purchasing the software) then that conversion is also attributed to the affiliate partner.

Affiliates are partners that drive traffic to your properties through tracked links, and earn a cut when that traffic converts. Affiliate partners are a subset of marketing partners. Also see "Marketing partner"

An affiliate program is an organized system that enables affiliates to drive traffic to your properties through tracked links, and earn a cut when that traffic converts. Affiliates come in many different forms and they can include: influencers, content creators, publications, membership associations, and technology vendors.

Typically agencies who either send you leads or close business on your behalf. They may also run the client's program on your software and charge them for services. Also see "value added reseller"

Application forms consists of a series of questions that prospective partners have to answer before joining the program. This allows you to approve or decline partners that request to join your program.

A metric SaaS companies use that represents the average amount of money that customers spend on a solution.