Forecastable's Education Center -- The best advice on building partner programs that produce forecastable revenue.
What is channel partner recruitment? Short answer: Channel partner recruitment is the process of finding, qualifying, and signing the partners who will actually sell, service, or implement your product. It is the front door of a partner program, and it decides more about the program’s results than any later stage, because you cannot enable or […]
Read Article
What a B2B partner marketing strategy is Short answer: A B2B partner marketing strategy is the plan for how you market to partners, through partners, and with partners, so partner relationships turn into pipeline rather than logos on a slide. It works when each of those three audiences has its own goal and the whole […]
What a channel partner marketing plan is Short answer: A channel partner marketing plan is the written, one-page artifact that says what you and a partner will do together this quarter to source pipeline, who owns each part, and how you will measure it. It turns a marketing strategy into a specific set of commitments […]
What a channel partner marketing strategy is Short answer: A channel partner marketing strategy is the plan for generating demand through your partners, using co-marketing, funding, and partner-ready assets to produce pipeline in their markets. It is a through-channel motion you design and fund, not a one-off co-branded webinar you run when someone remembers to. […]
What does recruiting a partner actually look like? Short answer: How to recruit partners is to define an ideal partner profile, source candidates against it, lead the first conversation with overlap data and a specific small joint motion rather than a brand pitch, and qualify against the joint number both sides could commit to. Recruiting […]
Read Article
What does it mean to scale a partner program? Short answer: How to scale a partner program is to tier the portfolio so four to six partners get weekly attention and the rest get a quarterly pulse, standardize a weekly co-sell deal review and quarterly executive readout across every Tier 1 partnership, install a sourced […]
Read Article
What is building a partner program? Short answer: Building a partner program is the end-to-end exercise of designing and launching a partner-led growth system from zero, with a defined thesis, archetypes, operating model, partner journey, and measurement scoreboard. It is a system-design effort, not a hiring decision. A working partner program has three properties. It […]
Read Article
What is partner sourcing? Short answer: partner sourcing is the deliberate process of identifying, prioritizing, and engaging prospective partners against an ideal partner profile, run like account-based selling rather than inbound waiting. In 2026, the programs that recruit the partners they actually need do partner sourcing as a discipline; the ones that recruit whoever applies […]
Read Article
What is an ideal partner profile? Short answer: an ideal partner profile is the explicit definition of the partner type a program is built to recruit, activate, and scale, expressed as a small set of measurable traits rather than a logo wish-list. In 2026, the programs that produce partner-sourced pipeline have a written profile they […]
Read Article
What is partner tiering? Short answer: partner tiering is the practice of grouping partners into levels (typically by production, commitment, or capability) and matching investment and benefits to each level. In 2026, the tiers that work are earned on output, not assigned on logos or revenue size. A tier system is an investment allocation tool, […]
Read Article
The ServiceNow Partner Program (run through the Now Partner Hub) is a tiered partner program that gives partners access to ServiceNow’s enterprise customer base, joint go-to-market support, and certification credentials. The program organizes partners into a tier structure (Registered, Specialist, Premier, Elite, plus designations like Build Partner and Service Partner) with progressive benefits at each […]
Read Article
Partner onboarding is the structured 90-day program that takes a newly signed partner from contract close to first sourced deal. Most teams treat onboarding as a one-week checklist; the partners who actually produce revenue went through a 90-day cadence with weekly close dates, an executive sponsor, and a forcing function on the first joint deal. […]
Read Article
A channel sales strategy is the operating plan that defines how a vendor sells through partners: which partners, in which segments, with which economics, on which cadence, against which pipeline target. Most published channel strategies are partner-count plans. The right strategy is anchored in partner economics: the producer-consumer ratio, the partner-attached pipeline target, the operating […]
Read Article
Partner program examples are most useful when you read past the logo gallery and study the structural mechanics: tier requirements, deal-registration rules, MDF gates, certification thresholds, co-sell expectations, and attribution policy. The same five or six structural patterns repeat across every successful program, regardless of category or scale. The patterns are what’s portable; the brand […]
Read Article
