Partnership teams spend considerable time trying to activate and enable partners after they have joined an ecosystem.
But if only a relatively small percentage of those partners ever become productive, perhaps part of the problem exists much earlier in the process.
At the Partnership Leaders Catalyst Summit in Brooklyn, Bill Kenney co-hosted a Power Circle with Paridhi Pansari from OvalEdge exploring exactly that challenge: The 20% Problem: Building a Better Partner Funnel.
The problem may start before activation
Most organizations with established partner programs will recognize the situation. Partners are recruited, agreements are signed, onboarding takes place, and resources are invested in enablement. Yet over time, it becomes clear that a relatively small group of those partners is responsible for the majority of meaningful activity.
The natural response is to focus on activation. How can we engage the inactive partners? Do they need more training? Better marketing support? More incentives? Improved communications? A stronger partner portal?
Those are all reasonable questions, and effective enablement absolutely matters. But our discussion at Catalyst focused on an earlier point in the partner lifecycle.
Why were those partners recruited in the first place?
If an organization continually recruits partners that subsequently require significant effort to activate, there may be more than an enablement problem. There may be a recruitment and qualification problem.
In my work with MEET, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how organizations identify and develop the right business relationships. Whether a company is building a partner ecosystem, entering a new market, developing strategic alliances, or trying to get more value from industry events, the underlying principle is similar: more connections do not automatically create more value.
The quality and relevance of those connections matter enormously.
Understand what makes your best partners successful
One of the questions we explored during the Power Circle was simple: when you think about your best partners, what do they have in common?
Most partnership leaders can identify their strongest partners immediately. What is often less clearly defined is why those relationships became successful while others did not.
Perhaps those partners have strong relationships with a particular customer segment. They may possess complementary technology or specialist expertise. They might provide geographic reach, implementation capabilities, market knowledge, or access to opportunities the company could not efficiently reach alone.
There may also be less tangible characteristics, such as executive commitment, willingness to collaborate, or a strong cultural fit between the organizations.
Understanding these patterns allows partnership teams to begin developing an Ideal Partner Profile.
Sales organizations routinely define an Ideal Customer Profile so that resources can be concentrated on prospects with a higher probability of becoming valuable customers. Partnership teams can apply similar thinking.
Instead of asking, “Who could become a partner?” we can ask, “Which organizations are most likely to become successful partners?”
That distinction matters.
Follow customer demand
One of my favorite observations from the summit came from Leah Yomtovian of Oracle: “Customers want outcomes, not products.”
That idea should have a significant influence on how we think about partnerships.
If customers are ultimately looking for outcomes, ecosystems should be built around helping customers achieve those outcomes. That means customer demand can become one of the strongest signals for deciding which partners an organization should recruit.
Look at the conversations already taking place across the business. What capabilities are customers repeatedly requesting? Which integrations keep appearing in sales discussions? Where do customers need specialist expertise, implementation support, geographic coverage, additional services, or complementary technology?
Those gaps can point directly toward valuable partnership opportunities.
This is something we also see when companies are expanding into new markets. A business entering the United States, for example, can theoretically build relationships with hundreds of potential service providers, distributors, technology partners, advisors, and commercial organizations.
The challenge isn’t finding possible partners. The challenge is determining which relationships actually solve a business or customer need.
Rather than recruiting partners simply because they fit a category, recruitment can be guided by demonstrated demand. It moves the strategy from “Who wants to partner with us?” toward the much more useful question of “Who can help us create an outcome our customers already want?”
Qualify before you invest
Partnerships consume resources long before they generate revenue.
Every new partner needs some combination of onboarding, training, relationship management, technical support, marketing resources, sales coordination, product involvement, and executive attention. Even relatively lightweight partnerships create an organizational cost.
That makes qualification particularly important.
A prospective partner shouldn’t qualify simply because the two companies appear complementary on paper. Before significant resources are committed, there should be a clear understanding of why the relationship makes sense and what both organizations expect to achieve.
Does the partner have access to customers we want to reach? Are the companies’ capabilities genuinely complementary? Is there evidence of customer demand? Is there a realistic route to commercial value? Does the prospective partner have the resources and commitment to participate? What will each organization contribute? Most importantly, what would success actually look like?
These questions can sometimes make recruitment slower, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
A smaller number of well-qualified partners can create considerably more value than a large ecosystem filled with relationships that require constant effort simply to remain active.
Bigger ecosystems are not automatically better ecosystems
This brings us to one of the more uncomfortable questions for partnership teams: are we measuring the things that actually matter?
Partner numbers are easy to report. If a program grows from 200 partners to 300, it looks like progress. If another 100 organizations sign agreements during the year, that looks like momentum.
But what happened after those agreements were signed?
If only a small proportion of those organizations generate opportunities, serve customers, contribute expertise, develop solutions, or create revenue, ecosystem size tells us very little about ecosystem health.
Worse, a large inactive partner base can create additional complexity. Teams have more relationships to administer, more communications to manage, more data to maintain, and more organizations competing for finite enablement resources.
The objective should therefore not be to build the largest ecosystem possible. It should be to build an ecosystem capable of consistently creating value.
For one company, that may require hundreds or thousands of partners. For another, a much smaller network of highly aligned organizations may produce better results. There is no universal ideal size.
Productivity matters more than the headline number.
Apply funnel thinking to partnerships
One of the reasons I like thinking about this as a “partner funnel” is that businesses already understand the concept.
Sales organizations have spent decades becoming more sophisticated about their funnels. They define ideal customer profiles, evaluate lead sources, qualify opportunities, track conversion rates, and analyze why prospects progress or disappear.
There is no reason partnership organizations shouldn’t apply the same discipline.
Where did our highest-performing partners originally come from? Which recruitment sources consistently produce productive relationships? What attributes do those partners share? Which early signals indicate that a prospective partner is likely to succeed? At what point should we decide that an opportunity isn’t strong enough to justify further investment?
We can then look at conversion throughout the partner lifecycle. How many prospective partners become qualified partners? How many qualified partners become active? How many active partners generate opportunities? How many ultimately contribute to revenue, customer success, innovation, market access, or whatever outcomes the ecosystem has been designed to produce?
That gives partnership leaders a much more useful picture than the total number of logos sitting in a partner directory.
The goal isn’t to fill the top of the funnel with as many organizations as possible. It is to increase the quality of the organizations entering the funnel and improve the probability that they will eventually create value.
Keep, stop, start
We concluded our Power Circle with a simple exercise that I think any partnership team can use.
If your objective is to find and attract more organizations that resemble your best partners, consider your current recruitment activity through three lenses: what should you keep doing, what should you stop doing, and what should you start doing?
Keep the activities and sources that consistently lead to productive relationships. That could be customer introductions, targeted outreach, referrals from existing partners, particular events, industry communities, or something entirely different. The important thing is to trace successful partnerships back to their origins and understand what is actually working.
Then look at what should stop. This can be more difficult because some activities may generate impressive numbers. But if a recruitment channel produces a large volume of partners that rarely activate or create value, the volume itself shouldn’t justify continued investment.
Finally, determine what should start. Once you understand the attributes shared by your strongest partners and where those relationships originated, you can become much more deliberate about finding similar organizations.
This is ultimately a shift from measuring recruitment activity to measuring recruitment quality.
Choose who you go on the walk with
There were many excellent perspectives throughout the Catalyst Summit. Jay McBain of Omdia highlighted the enormous amount of business data that has yet to be trained into LLMs, and conversations with leaders from organizations including Tribe AI, Anthropic, Ramp, Siemens, and Eliza demonstrated how quickly the ecosystem landscape continues to develop.
One comment from Steve Lucas of Boomi, however, provided a particularly fitting way to think about the partner funnel: “Choose who you go on the walk with.”
The more I work in partnerships, the more relevant that idea becomes.
As ecosystems become increasingly important to how companies innovate, reach customers, enter new markets, and deliver solutions, choosing the organizations we build alongside becomes a strategic decision.
We shouldn’t be trying to persuade every possible organization to join the journey. We should be identifying those where there is genuine alignment, complementary value, customer demand, mutual commitment, and a strong probability of creating something worthwhile together.
Partner activation and enablement will continue to be critical parts of ecosystem strategy. But there is an opportunity to move the conversation further upstream.
If we want more productive ecosystems, perhaps the answer isn’t simply getting better at activating the partners we’ve already recruited.
Perhaps we need to get much better at choosing who we go on the walk with.
About MEET
MEET helps B2B & B2G companies gain traction and scale in the U.S. through trade shows, events, and strategic connections. Contact Bill Kenney for a no-obligation conversation: bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.