If you’ve built a partner channel, you already know the frustration. You’ve got plenty of partners on paper, but almost none of them are actually sending you real referrals.

Why? Most of those partners were never in a position to refer you in the first place.

I’ve spent the last 10 years building Union Square Consulting primarily through a partner channel. Specifically, a referral channel, with no revenue share or commissions paid to our partners. Through thousands of trials and errors, I’ve learned that a channel only produces valuable referrals when you get one thing right first: properly defining your Ideal Partner Profile and Partner Personas.

In this article, I’ll share what we’ve learned these last ten years. You’ll see how to drive better results by targeting better partners, and how to improve your interactions by understanding your partners and what motivates them.

Get our Ideal Partner Profile worksheet here.

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3 Criteria Every Ideal Partner Must Meet

Through thousands of iterations, I’ve learned that an Ideal Partner has to check ALL three of these boxes:

• Talk to our ICP/BPs regularly
• Talk to our ICP/BPs about what we do organically
• Benefit directly and immensely from the work we do

Let’s walk through each one.

They have to talk to your ICP and Buyer Personas regularly

We work primarily with B2B tech companies at $20M to $500M in ARR, so we have to talk to people who regularly talk to those companies.

Say I reach out to a VC focused on seed-stage investing. After a lot of effort, I finally get them excited about what we do. Then, they refer me a portfolio company with zero salespeople, trying to move off founder-led sales. I don’t know how to help that company, so I’ve just wasted everyone’s time.

Now let’s say they’re talking to our ICP, but they talk to the SDRs or the accounts payable team. This does me no good. Sure, in theory they could tell the AP person how great we are at transforming GTM in B2B tech, then get us an intro to the CRO. But that’s a major uphill battle, and it rarely works out.

This is where I’ve butted heads with so many people. I get LinkedIn DMs on this all the time, and people seem to believe “it’s always worth a shot.”

Let me tell you, it’s not.

If you burn your resources on stretch prospects, you fall far short of target. I don’t want to spend my time selling to people where my odds are 1 in 1,000.

So I need to talk to people whose primary job is talking to the decision makers and influencers at the companies I want to work with. Those people exist, and they deserve 100% of my time, attention, and focus.

They need to talk about what you do, naturally and organically

Say I talk to someone who regularly meets with CROs at B2B tech companies, but they never talk about GTM. Let’s say they sell life insurance. That’s too much of an uphill battle.

It’s easier to see if we flip it. In 15 years of talking to CROs at B2B tech companies, I’ve never once talked to any of them about life insurance. We talk about GTM strategy, people, process, technology, and metrics. So if someone sells a product that helps with those things, it comes up naturally. Almost every time.

For reasons I won’t get into, we don’t seek out or monetize referrals to these vendors. So I always find it funny that I’m often the one begging them to let me refer business to them. I’ll even ask for a free account so we can use the product ourselves and speak to our clients about it with real, firsthand authority.

That’s how naturally and organically I am talking about some vendors in our space, that I’m begging them to help me sell for them, for free!

They need to benefit directly and immensely

Say we find someone who speaks directly to the people we want to work with, at the companies we want to work with, about the work we do. That person, and their company, both need to benefit from it. A lot.

Your partners wake up every day asking, “How do I hit my targets, make more money, and get promoted?” They’re only interested in partners who can make a real impact on their ability to do that.

Here’s a real example. When I was an AE at Salesforce I had tech vendors asking me to pitch their product. For some, if the customer bought, I’d get $500 of sales credit against my $1,000,000 quota. That’s not even close to enough to justify the investment of time it takes to learn yet another product and pitch it.

The same goes for non-monetary benefits. We spend most of our time with GTM Advisors and Operating Partners at PE/VC firms, who simply can’t do their jobs without us. Their only job is to help improve GTM in their portfolio and they can’t do that without someone doing the work we do.

That’s what you want in your Ideal Partner Profile: partners who serve the same customers you do, so that when you do your job well, both they and their company come out ahead. 

When helping your customers is how your partner hits their own number, you don’t have to convince them to send you referrals. It’s in their interest to.

The Always-On, AI-Driven Ideal Partner Profile

Everything above tells you how to think about your Ideal Partner Profile, and how it overlaps with (but differs from) your Ideal Customer Profile. What it doesn’t cover is the mechanics: how to define it in granular terms, how to keep it updated, and how to use AI to refine it, both once and on an ongoing basis.

Those pieces are critical. If you just answer the questions above, or the ones in our free worksheet here, you’ll have a solid understanding of your Ideal Partners. But you won’t have a working model that drives revenue. Not today, and definitely not a year or two from now as the market and your business evolve.

For that, read our article on the Living AI-Driven ICP, and apply the same concepts to your Ideal Partner Profile and Partner Persona definitions.

Ready to Drive More Referral Revenue?

Apply for The Partner 90, and build a partner channel that drives predictable referral revenue. See results tied to revenue in 3 months.

Learn More