Forecastable's Education Center -- The best advice on building partner programs that produce forecastable revenue.
What is partner pipeline for the CFO? Short answer: Partner pipeline for the CFO is the view of partner-influenced and partner-sourced revenue translated into the language a finance leader uses to make budget decisions, conversion rates, attribution clarity, and a defensible return on the program’s cost. It is the difference between a partnerships team that […]
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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 partner field marketing? Short answer: Partner field marketing is the regional, in-person and account-targeted marketing motion that two companies run together to build pipeline in a defined territory, against a named target account list and a closed-loop report. It covers dinners, workshops, roadshows, and joint local campaigns, and it is measured as a […]
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What is a partner ICP? Short answer: A partner ICP is the ideal partner profile (IPP), the written, scored definition of the partners worth recruiting based on the accounts they touch, the segment they serve, and their capacity to sell. It is the partner-side equivalent of a sales ideal customer profile, and it exists to […]
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What is partner-influenced pipeline? Short answer: Partner influenced pipeline is the set of open opportunities a partner touched or advanced without originating, measured against a signed definition agreed by partnerships, sales, and finance. It sits alongside partner sourced pipeline, which a partner originated, and the two together describe the partner motion’s contribution to the funnel. […]
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What is partner-influenced revenue? Short answer: Partner influenced revenue is closed-won revenue from deals a partner touched or advanced without originating, measured against a signed attribution definition. It is the revenue-stage counterpart of partner influenced pipeline, and it answers the question a CFO actually asks: how much of what we closed had a partner’s fingerprints […]
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What does a partner manager do day-to-day? Short answer: A partner manager’s day is built around advancing partner-sourced and partner-influenced deals, running a touch cadence across a tiered book of partners, and unblocking the co-sell motions already in flight. It is a sales-adjacent operating job, not a relationship-management job, and the calendar of a good […]
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What is a partner margin structure? Short answer: A partner margin structure is the set of discounts, uplifts, and tiers that determine how much a reseller or channel partner earns on a deal, and what behavior earns more. It is the economic engine of a resell program, and it is designed to pay the most […]
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What are outsourced partnerships? Short answer: Outsourced partnerships is the engagement model where a B2B company hires a fractional partnerships leader, a partner-sourced GTM agency, or a partner-as-a-service vendor to run all or part of the partnerships motion instead of (or alongside) building an in-house team. It exists because partnerships is a slow-to-build function with […]
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What does it mean to go to market with a partner? Short answer: How to go to market with a partner is to agree on a joint revenue number with the partner’s senior leader, pick a small named account set both sides will work, ship a one-page joint value prop the sellers on both sides […]
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What does it take to hire the right partner manager? Short answer: How to hire a partner manager is to write the scorecard against the partner motion you actually run, screen for sales DNA over relationship enthusiasm, run a deal-review interview where the candidate walks a real co-sell account, and make the first ninety days […]
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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 […]
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