Forecastable's Education Center -- The best advice on building partner programs that produce forecastable revenue.
What are partner deal stages? Short answer: Partner deal stages is the structured set of pipeline stages a co-sell deal moves through, with exit criteria at each stage that name both the host-side and the partner-side moves required to advance. It exists because the direct-sale stage map does not capture the partner-side work that makes […]
Read Article
What is an MDF event? Short answer: An MDF event is a partner-funded or jointly funded field marketing motion where market development funds underwrite a customer-facing activity (executive dinner, regional workshop, conference booth, or industry breakfast) with a named pipeline target and a sourced and influenced reporting back to the funding partner. It is not […]
Demand generation that runs through partners by borrowing their trust, measured as pipeline.
Short answer: most MDF (Market Development Funds) programs in B2B SaaS waste 50 to 70 percent of their budget. The cause is structural, not size. MDF gets framed too narrowly as marketing money. It then goes to partners who will not run the activity that drives pipeline. The fix is a defensible MDF program that […]
What is a co-sell agency? Short answer: A co-sell agency is an external firm that runs co-sell programs on behalf of a vendor. It is different from an advisor (who coaches) or a consultant (who designs). The agency executes the mechanics: account mapping, partner cadences, deal reviews, attribution reporting, and partner-program operations. The agency model […]
Read Article
What is a partner newsletter? Short answer: a partner newsletter is a recurring communication sent to a company’s partners to keep them informed, enabled, and active. In 2026, the ones that work are not announcements; they are activation tools that drive a specific partner action in every send. A monthly roundup of company news is […]
Read Article
Short answer: Always-on partner communications keep partners aware of you. On their own, they do not generate pipeline. The pipeline comes from partner account planning: dedicated, recurring account-planning sessions built on completed account mapping. Always-on comms are the wiring between those sessions, not a substitute for them. Crossbeam network data puts the average win-rate lift […]
Read Article
AWS ACE (the APN Customer Engagement program) is the operating mechanism that lets AWS partners track and co-sell deals with AWS field sellers. Partners that run ACE well produce co-sell revenue that compounds; partners that treat ACE as a back-office reporting task produce ACE pipelines that look full and don’t close. The thing that separates […]
Read Article
An alliance manager is the person who owns the operating relationship with a strategic partner: the joint motion, the joint pipeline, the executive cadence, and the deal-by-deal field execution. The role is not a single role; it’s a spectrum from co-sell ops to strategic alliance lead. Most alliance manager hires fail in the first 18 […]
Read Article
An account planning template is the structured document that captures the named contacts, decision drivers, partner mix, deal mechanics, and operating cadence for a strategic account. The template is only useful if it’s short enough that an AE will keep it updated and rich enough that a frontline sales manager can read it without the […]
Read Article
Co-sell is a B2B sales motion where two companies plan and execute against shared accounts together, with both AE teams working the deal and both sides…
Read Article
A joint value proposition is the customer-facing statement two partner companies use to explain why their combined offering produces a better outcome than…
Read Article
Partner activation is the structured process of turning a newly signed partner from “logo on a slide” into “selling, registering deals, and producing…
Read Article
A Salesforce ISV partner is an independent software vendor that builds a product on the Salesforce platform and sells it through the AppExchange. The motion combines product distribution, joint go-to-market with Salesforce account teams, and access to a buying audience the partner could not reach alone.
Read Article
