Ask any stand-up comedian the number one rule of their craft and they will tell you: You’ve got to know your audience.
Running a successful partner marketing program is much the same — if you don't know your audience, you may be met with the dreaded response of... crickets. The reality is, many businesses launch partner programs without a clear understanding of who their partners are, only to later discover that they struggle to recruit new partners or keep them engaged in the program.
Taking the time upfront to study your partner personas will inform a solid strategy for positioning the program to partners, providing them with the right resources and creating commission structures that motivate them. What’s more, with these strong fundamentals in place, you’ll be in an excellent position to expand your program in the future — whether that involves targeting new personas or layering on new program types.
In this article, we will:
- Explain everything you need to know about partner personas
- Introduce a 5-step process for building your own partner personas
Whether you're looking to improve your existing program or starting a new program from scratch, creating partner personas is the best way to unlock the maximum growth potential of your program.
What are partner personas?
Partner personas are research-based profiles that describe each different group of partners you work with. Not every program will need multiple personas and it’s certainly okay to focus on a single persona. However, if you’re running multiple partner programs (for example, an affiliate program as well as a referral program), you’ll need at least one persona for each program.
There are three main types of partner programs:
- Affiliate partner programs: Affiliate marketers, B2B influencers and content creators use custom campaign links to drive traffic to your website and campaigns.
- Referral partner programs: Consultants and your own customers drive qualified leads to your sales team.
- Reseller partner programs: Agencies and value-added resellers (VARs) own the entire sales process and send your business closed deals.
You can also have multiple personas within one program type. For example, Riipen, an experiential learning platform, runs multiple partner programs with at least four total personas: students, working professionals, organizations and affiliates sourced from PartnerStack’s Marketplace.
Related: Red flags to look out for when recruiting partners to your program.
Understanding your target audience
Starting with a thorough understanding of your target audience is crucial in creating effective personas. A target audience is a specific group of people for whom your product or service is designed. To truly grasp who your target audience is, you need to gather comprehensive data about their demographics, behaviors, needs and pain points.
Once you have gathered the data, start identifying patterns and trends that will help you create a clear picture of your target audience. This picture should include details such as their age, gender, occupation, education level, income and interests. Additionally, understanding their behaviors — such as how they use your product or service, what features they like or dislike and what motivates them to make a purchase — is essential.
Having a deep understanding of your target audience is the foundation for creating partner personas that can effectively sell to them.
Why are partner personas important?
The reason you need partner personas is simple: each type of partner wants and needs different things to be successful. Partner personas act as a cheat code to help you recruit new partners effectively and give each group the support they need to become active participants in your program.
What’s more, understanding how you can best support each persona will ensure that you’re directing your resources into the groups that are most likely to succeed. If you don’t understand your personas in-depth, you risk putting your efforts into partners that won’t give you a return on your investment. These personas should be derived from actual user research to authentically represent the needs and behaviors of real users. They are also an excellent resource for interdepartmental collaboration because they communicate your vision to others in the organization.
Finally, slowing down to document your personas and make sure you’re serving each effectively builds a solid foundation for scale later. One of the biggest mistakes is adding new program types to “save” a struggling program. If your program is built on a faulty foundation, all the expansion in the world won’t help. You need to step back and figure out first how to make your original program resonate with partners. Only then can you effectively branch out into new program types.
The role of data in creating personas
Data plays a pivotal role in creating personas. It helps identify patterns and trends that form a clear picture of the target audience.
There are two types of data used in creating personas: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data is gathered through methods like interviews, focus groups and surveys, providing insights into the behaviors, needs, and pain points of the target audience. Quantitative data, on the other hand, is collected through online analytics tools and offers information about the demographics and behaviors of the target audience.
To create effective personas, it’s essential to combine both qualitative and quantitative data. This combination provides a comprehensive understanding of your target audience, helping you create personas that accurately represent them.
How do you create partner personas?
There are just a few simple steps to developing personas and creating your own partner personas: identify your partner types, research them intently, synthesize your findings, distribute internally and continuously refine. We’ll explain each step in detail, with examples.
Identify your partner types
Through data analysis
For some partner programs, there may be obvious groupings that distinguish your types of partners. For example, if you have one group of technology partners and another group of marketing partners, it’s an easy split. For other partner programs, however, it’s less clear cut. If this is the case, you may decide to begin your program with one large group, and let segments emerge organically over time. Then you’ll identify them through your analytics.
If you’re using a modern PRM tool like PartnerStack, you can examine data about which factors make partners more effective (for example, different locations, cohorts or links). In this way, you can leverage the data around your existing partner base to create segments for you.
Crunching the data can also help you identify your top performing partners. Identifying these individuals will be extremely important for the next step — the research phase — where you can uncover insights about these ideal partners that you can mold your recruitment strategy around.
Using AI
If you don't already have existing data about your partners — or if you want to skip some of the manual work — you can use AI tools to jump start your partner persona creation. Ola Ogungbemile, CSM at PartnerStack, shares his prompt sequence to build your partner personas:
- Define your business and the problem your product solves. Prompt with your level of experience, business are and who your target audience is.
- Create partner persona(s) based on the target audience. Ask your chosen AI tool to identify and describe two or more partner personas based on your target audience. Ask it to provide a comprehensive description and real-world examples of each partner persona.
- Bonus: identify potential partners for each persona. Prompt your chosen AI tool to find 20 potential partners, including their contact information, details about their potential audience and more. Format this in a summary table for easy review later.
Understanding your target users is crucial, as it helps in defining and distinguishing your partner personas within one program type. Below are some typical ways you may choose to distinguish your partner personas within one program type.
Common ways to segment your target audience:
- Type of organization (universities, agencies, SaaS companies)
- Job role (consultants, students, B2B influencers and content creators)
- Location (North America, LatAm and EMEA)
- Tier (silver, gold and platinum tiers — where higher sellers get a larger revenue cut)
When creating personas, you should also consider the level of knowledge that each group has about your offering. For example, customer ambassadors who love your product likely need lighter support than folks who come in from a wider, less qualified audience. Your ambassadors may just need marketing materials, whereas your external affiliates will need a lot more enablement and education. Including fictional personal details in these personas can enhance their realism and relatability, helping marketers and designers better understand their audience's goals and limitations.
Study each persona thoroughly
During the user research phase, your goal is to understand the individuals who make up each group: their stories, their motivations, their needs, their concerns. This process will build up your empathy and your ability to apply the ‘lens’ of each segment when you’re designing program touchpoints later. There are a variety of methods you can use to collect this information.
User research methods
- A series of 1:1 interviews with partners (especially top-performing partners)
- A survey you send out to partners (including both multiple choice and free form answers)
- A focus group you facilitate that brings multiple partners together for a discussion
- A series of discussion with your partner advisory council (PAC)
- An informal chat with members of your team who interface with partners regularly
When talking to partners one-on-one, you really want to understand the partner program from their perspective. Unlike personas based solely on research, this approach ensures a deeper, context-driven understanding. Think about the entirety of the partner journey when you design your questions, from recruitment to onboarding to promoting your products and services to payout.
Questions you may want to ask:
- How did you find out about our program originally?
- What enticed you to join? Did anything make you hesitate at first?
- What did you find confusing when you first got started?
- What are your biggest challenges or obstacles when promoting our product?
- What's the most rewarding part of being a partner?
- What resources would help you more effectively sell our offering?
- If you could change one thing about our program, what would it be?
If you're lucky enough to get a handful of your top-performing partners on a call, pay particular attention to identifying the qualities and personality traits that make them ideal. This will make it easier to seek out other partners in the future who fit the profile.
Synthesize your research
Next, you’ll want to boil down your research into a concise, personas based summary. Having a clean, easy, readable document will help you remember important insights and consistently apply them throughout the partner journey. Communicating your findings clearly is also helpful for distributing your partner personas throughout your organization.
For each persona, include a concise summary of:
- Their key motivators
- Their current challenges
- Their biggest needs
- A few verbatim quotes that help bring the profile to life
Get a head start on building your partner personas by using our template⟶
Share documents across your organization
While the main purpose of creating partner personas is for yourself and your own team, it can also be an extremely valuable tool for articulating your vision as you collaborate with other teams. It can serve as a concise overview that helps other team members get up to speed fast.
- Marketing: Your content team can support you by creating new or sharing existing collateral. Product marketing can give advance notices to partners for big product launches
- Sales: Your sales team can share the sales enablement resources they use to train new salespeople, since this is not unlike resellers selling your product. You can either directly use their training materials or you can use them as a template and tweak to fit your purposes.
- Leadership: Display the value of your program to your program to validate your efforts and justify asking for more budget.
- Product: Work with your development team to take your program further with technology integrations like integrating your PRM with your CRM.
Refine your personas continuously
Your personas should be a living document that gets updated regularly as part of a user-centered design process. After all, your partners are not static, so why should your program be?
It can be helpful to periodically survey partners to see what is and isn’t working, as well as uncover new risks and opportunities. Analytics can also help you refine how you address each partner personas as you troubleshoot their sticky points. Ask yourself, where is the drop-off? What enablement resources can you create or what campaigns can you run to address them?
You may also want to adjust incentives for various personas over time. For example, you may notice that customer ambassadors are more motivated by social status and swag, whereas affiliates are more motivated by a payout. Or as your company’s overall business strategy inevitably shifts over time, you may want to beef up commissions for actions your company that are a higher priority.
Avoiding common mistakes when creating partner personas
Creating effective personas requires careful planning and execution. However, there are common mistakes that designers and marketers often make during the persona creation process. Here are some of the most common pitfalls to avoid:
- Not conducting thorough research: Personas are based on data collected from various sources. If the research is not thorough, the personas may not accurately represent the target audience. Use real partner research in combination with AI tools, web searches and other methods to create meaningful, authentic insights.
- Creating too many personas: Having too many personas can be overwhelming and may dilute the clarity of your target audience. It’s better to create a few well-defined personas that accurately represent your target audience.
- Not keeping personas up-to-date: Personas are not static and need to be updated regularly to reflect changes in the target audience. Failing to update personas can lead to inaccurate or outdated representations.
- Not using personas in the design process: Personas are created to help designers and marketers understand the needs and behaviors of the target audience. If they are not used in the design process, they may not provide any value.
- Not involving stakeholders in the persona creation process: Personas need to be accepted by stakeholders to be effective. Involving stakeholders in the persona creation process ensures they are accepted and used in the design process.
By avoiding these common mistakes, you can create effective personas that accurately represent your target audience and help you develop products and services that meet their needs.
How do I use my partner personas to grow my program?
Once you’ve created well-researched marketing personas and partner personas and documented them into concise summaries, you now have a clear lens you can apply to every single touchpoint in the partner’s journey.
It’s a valuable exercise to map out each point on their partner journey for each persona and apply the empathetic lens of each persona. Pretend you are from that group and ask yourself: “What’s in it for me?” Seeing each point through their eyes will help you optimize each step for a better partner experience and ultimately drive more conversions. Every email and every page of web copy should be written with your partner persona in mind.
Knowing your audience also means your communication will be seen as helpful and not interruptive. Many vendors are hesitant to send multiple emails to new partners in their first week, fearing they’ll come on too strong. But if each of these touchpoints is intentional messaging that speaks to something that a persona cares about, even a large volume of communication will be welcome.
Partner persona trends for 2025
One of the key reasons to continue iterating on your partner personas is so they don't become outdated as industry trends shift with the times. For example, affiliate partners may have had only one partner persona in the past, whereas today they could be bucketed into multiple partner persona types, like B2B influencer, content creator and review sites.
Other trends for 2025 include the rise of partners powered by AI tools in their workflows. Not only can you take advantage of AI tools to help manage your partner program and automate certain tasks, you can use it to better create partner persona types and speak to those partners.
Put your partner personas to the test
Ultimately, creating partner personas is all about refining your aim, so that every campaign and touchpoint is a bullseye. By understanding the goals, pain points and product usage of potential customers, businesses can develop targeted marketing strategies that align with their audience's needs. Without partner personas, you may be wasting time launching arrows in the wrong direction. Better aim means better performance, no matter how many new personas or new program types you layer on.
While a variety of competing priorities may pull you away from creating partner personas, the old adage applies: Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. It pays to take a step back and ensure that every touchpoint caters to your partners’ motivations, enables their success and helps them overcome their hurdles. If you can do that, you’ll have your audience in the palm of your hand. And whether you’re a partner marketer or a standup comic, that’s no joke.
This article was originally published in September 2021.
.jpg)
