Forecastable's Education Center -- The best advice on building partner programs that produce forecastable revenue.
Alex Buckles
Most companies hire first and plan later. Here is how to design a partner organization the other way around, from partner data to a board-ready plan in about eight weeks, with sales-minded roles and AI before headcount.
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Short answer Short answer: Partner channel marketing is marketing you run with and through your partners to reach their customers, instead of only marketing direct to your own. It covers co-branded campaigns, through-partner demand generation, market development funds, and partner enablement content, and it works when it is tied to a sales motion and to […]
Short answer Short answer: The channel marketing best practices that hold up are the ones that tie every joint activity to attributable pipeline: a real joint value proposition, funds tied to outcomes, plays that fit the partner’s audience, agreed lead routing, and attribution that shows what produced. They work because they treat channel marketing as […]
Short answer Short answer: A partner marketing program is the structured way you plan, fund, and run demand generation together with your partners so both companies create pipeline neither would create alone. It works when the joint activity produces attributable pipeline and both sides can see it, and it fails when it turns into logo […]
Alex Buckles
Most companies hire first and plan later. Here is how to design a partner organization the other way around, from partner data to a board-ready plan in about eight weeks, with sales-minded roles and AI before headcount.
Read Article
Short answer Short answer: An MSP channel partner is a managed service provider that adopts your product and runs it on behalf of its own clients as part of an ongoing service, rather than reselling it and walking away. The relationship is different from a standard reseller because the MSP embeds your product into a […]
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Short answer Short answer: A partner training platform is software that delivers, tracks, and certifies partner education, onboarding, product training, sales enablement, and certification, so a vendor can bring many partners up to speed at scale. The best one fits how your partners actually learn and connects to your program, but the thing to remember […]
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Short answer Short answer: A systems integrator, or SI, is a company that designs, connects, and implements multiple products and systems into one working solution for a client. It does not just resell software; it architects how the pieces fit, builds the integrations, and takes responsibility for the whole solution running end to end. Here […]
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Short answer Short answer: A channel partner in business is a company that sells, delivers, or supports another company’s product to end customers, rather than the vendor selling to those customers directly. It earns margin, commission, or services revenue for extending the vendor’s reach into markets and accounts the vendor could not serve as efficiently […]
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Short answer Short answer: The value added reseller business model is how a VAR makes money by reselling a vendor’s product and wrapping its own services, implementation, integration, support, and consulting, around it, earning margin on the product and revenue on the services. It works when the value-add is real enough that the customer would […]
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Short answer Short answer: A channel partner training program is the structured way you teach partner reps and technical teams to position, sell, deploy, and support your product so they can produce revenue on their own. It works when the training maps to the specific actions a partner has to take to close and deliver […]
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Short answer Short answer: Channel partner management is the ongoing work of turning signed partners into producing ones: recruiting for fit, activating each partner with a real motion, running a cadence, and attributing what they source. Done well it looks like managing a sales team; done badly it looks like maintaining a directory and hoping. […]
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Short answer Short answer: What is a value added reseller? It is a firm that resells a vendor’s product and adds its own services, implementation, integration, configuration, training, or support, so the customer buys a working solution rather than a bare license. The value-added services are what distinguish a VAR from a plain reseller who […]
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Short answer Short answer: A systems integrator is a firm that designs, builds, and delivers solutions by combining multiple technologies into something that works in the customer’s environment. For a software vendor, it is often the fastest route to market, because they get your product architected into the projects they run every day. Here is […]
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