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 MEDDIC for partnerships? Short answer: MEDDIC partnerships is the application of the classic sales qualification frame (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion) to co-sell and partner-sourced deals, with a partner-side mirror on every letter so the host AE and the partner counterpart qualify the same opportunity on the same […]
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What is nearbound sales? Short answer: Nearbound sales is the GTM motion where the AE works partner-derived signal (account overlap, partner-of-partner relationships, joint customer alerts, ecosystem-level engagement) as the primary prospecting input, instead of cold outbound or inbound MQLs. It sits between inbound and outbound, runs on signal from the ecosystem, and produces a higher […]
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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 is a partner attribution model? Short answer: A partner attribution model is the signed definition for how partner-touched opportunities count toward sourced, influenced, and assisted pipeline and revenue, with named rules for which partner role at which stage produces which credit. It exists because finance will not fund a partner pipeline forecast without a […]
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What is a partner battle card? Short answer: A partner battle card is the one-to-two page AE-facing enablement asset that names the joint value, the named buying personas, the co-sell motion, and the head-to-head competitive position when a host product and a partner product are sold together. It exists because AEs cannot remember the joint […]
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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 […]
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What is a partner discovery call? Short answer: A partner discovery call is the first thirty-to-sixty minute working session between a host partnerships team and a partner-side counterpart to determine whether a joint go-to-market motion is operationally viable, with a named joint customer use case, named overlap accounts, and a defined next move at the […]
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What is partner discovery data? Short answer: Partner discovery data is the structured intelligence layer that converts raw partner-side signal (account overlap, customer status, buying-committee relationships, deal-in-progress flags) into AE-ready signal with named tiers, partner-side context, and a defined next move per signal. It exists because raw overlap data is not signal, and AEs working […]
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What is a partner ecosystem map? Short answer: A partner ecosystem map is the structured visualization and classification of every partner in a company’s go-to-market ecosystem, with named tiers, partner-type categories (SI, ISV, reseller, marketplace, agency, alliance), joint motion labels, and overlap density per partner per segment. It exists because a company cannot make sound […]
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Account Mapping
Co-Sell
Crossbeam
Crossbeam MCP
Ecosystem-Led Growth
Model Context Protocol
Partner Operations
Alex Buckles
Crossbeam quietly turned its data into a callable utility. The Crossbeam MCP server only pays back if you treat it as the prescriptive layer for your co-sell motion. Here are 12 plays Supernode and Enterprise customers can run this week, the prompts that drive them, and the operating model behind them.
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