Partnerships are a key growth strategy for many businesses, but how do you know your programs are effective? As the year wraps up, every department reviews its metrics to plan and set goals for the new year. This is no different for partner channel managers. Validating your partner ecosystem and program requires tracking performance and setting clear goals.

How do you do this? You need to track the right KPIs for your partner program. Not only will this set the stage for even greater success in the year ahead, it can help you improve performance and pinpoint areas for improvement. Tracking the wrong KPIs, or not tracking at all, can result in missed opportunities and an inability to resolve challenges. It also creates a lack of clarity around how partnerships contribute to your business goals. Without the right metrics, it’s difficult to optimize resources or make a strong case to leadership for additional support.

28 Key Metrics for Partnerships

Revenue is the ultimate goal of your partner program, but achieving it involves tracking multiple objectives. Tracking KPIs monthly and quarterly help you accurately review the full picture at the end of the year. For extra credit, compare the growth and analyze the trends and patterns that appear for strategic planning for the next year.

Here are some key partnership metrics to measure year-end success.

Partner Revenue Metrics

Partnership revenue metrics are at the heart of evaluating partner performance. They directly show the financial success and impact of your efforts. Track these partner revenue KPIs by analyzing performance across partner type, tier, and channel:

• Partner-Sourced Revenue: The total income generated directly through partner referrals or sales over a specific period.
• Revenue Growth Rate: The rate at which partnership revenue is growing over time. It allows you to determine whether your partnership strategy contributes to your overall business growth.
• Partner Program ROI: Measures the profitability of the program by comparing the revenue to the costs and initiatives invested in building, maintaining, and growing the partnerships.

Tracking these partnership KPIs identifies your top performers in each segment, helping your team refine strategies to maximize return on investment and prioritize resources. Compare these against your yearly goals to identify gaps between projections and outcomes.

Partner Pipeline Metrics

Partnership pipeline metrics provide valuable insights into the health and potential revenue of your partnerships. To accelerate growth, use these partner KPIs to analyze revenue growth rates. By regularly tracking these metrics, you gain a deeper understanding of your partner program’s performance and identify areas for optimization. Here’s a breakdown:

• Pipeline Value: Total value of deals in the pipeline attributed to partners. This metric shows the potential total income from partner-sourced revenue.
• Deal Conversion Rate: Calculates the percentage of potential deals in the pipeline that successfully transition to closed-won deals. This indicates how efficiently your sales team is closing partner deals.
• Average Deal Size: Calculates the average monetary value of partner-related closed-won deals over a specific period. This metric offers insight into the partner program’s potential for driving higher-value sales.
• Lead Conversion: Tracks the total number of leads from partners and how many are converted to customers. This helps to examine lead quality to identify successful strategies or improve where needed.
• Deal Win Rate: Calculates the percentage of deals won out of the total number of deals closed.
• Time-to-Close: Measures the average time it takes to finalize a deal from initial contact with a lead to the moment it is closed-won.

Monitoring partner pipeline metrics helps evaluate the efficiency of your sales process and the program’s effectiveness in quickly converting leads. Identify areas that require improvement to tailor your enablement efforts, improve collaboration, predict revenue timelines, and spot bottlenecks that may delay deal closures. Use the results from these partner KPIs to assist in strategic planning to streamline the sales process in the new year.

Partner Upsell + Cross-sell Metrics

Leveraging partners for upselling and cross-selling boosts revenue streams and deepens customer relationships. It improves customer retention, making them more valuable over time, and reduces churn risk. Tracking these partnership metrics helps to maximize the value of these relationships.

• Upsell Revenue: Total revenue generated from selling premium or product add-ons to the same customer.
• Cross-sell Revenue: Total revenue generated from selling complementary products to the same customer.
• Number of products referred by each partner: Tracks which products the partner referred. This metric can provide insight into which solutions the partner needs more training on.
• Total Number of upsell and cross-sell referrals: Tracks the total number of upsell and cross-sell referrals per partner.
• Deal Win Rate: Calculates the percentage of deals won for upsell and cross-sell referrals.
• Number of different products a partner’s client purchased: Measures how many additional products each partner’s client purchased.
• Customer Retention from Partner Upsell/Cross-sell: Compare retention rates between customers who made additional purchases and those who didn’t. This metric can be used to encourage more partners to participate in these cross-selling activities.

Upsell and cross-sell KPIs show how well partners understand your products and align them with customer needs. They also help identify top and underperforming partners in each segment. Tracking these partner metrics gives insight to help improve partner enablement, customer satisfaction, and partner program profitability.

For example, if ABC Firm has a low referral count for upsell and cross-sell, reach out to assess their needs. This partner may need additional training or assets. Use these metrics to show how they can increase customer loyalty and boost revenue.

Partner Enablement Metrics

These partner enablement metrics are not all-encompassing, nor will you need them depending on your channel, type, or ecosystem. A strong enablement program shows partners you’re invested in their success, increasing partner loyalty and reducing churn. Partners showing high enablement activity rates are more likely to generate leads, close deals, and drive revenue faster. Partner enablement KPIs can indicate partnership health, along with partnership satisfaction.

• Number of Enablement Sessions: Total number of training and enablement sessions conducted for partners.
• Number of Partner Touchpoints: Measures how often you interact with partners including meetings, emails, & other communications.
• Partner Portal Activity: This metric includes KPIs such as frequency of logins, collateral views, and number of collateral downloads.
• Training and Certification Completion Rates: Calculates the percentage of partners who complete the required training and certification programs. This partner metric can indicate effective partner education and partner readiness.

Measuring partner enablement KPIs can pinpoint what is or isn’t working, helping you to refine your strategy for better results. Low numbers indicate low engagement. Use partner enablement metrics to re-engage or motivate these partners. Identifying high-performing enablement practices can allow you to scale growth efficiently by replicating them across your entire partner ecosystem.

Partner Incentive Metrics

Incentives keep partners engaged, reducing partner churn and creating stability. Tracking the right metrics for your partner incentive ensures your program drives the desired behaviors and delivers measurable results. Pay attention to how factors like different incentives, campaign durations, and success benchmarks impact the level of participation.

• Total Revenue Generated: Calculates the total revenue generated from the incentive.
• Total Leads Sent: Tracks the leads partners sent in that qualified for the incentive
• Total Opportunities Created: Calculates the number of leads that converted into an opportunity.
• Closed-Won Deals: Measures the leads that are converted into closed-won deals.
• Program Costs: Tracking the incentive payouts, or the total costs of the rewards given to the partners.

Additionally, you can compare these incentive-specific metrics with the overall partner revenue and pipeline metrics to evaluate the impact of the incentive program and assess the total return on investment. These metrics can be used to showcase the program’s value to stakeholders to allocate better resources, increase the budget, and expand the program.

Partner Satisfaction Metrics

Successful partner programs are built on relationships. Partnerships are more than just businesses selling or referring your solutions, they are key advocators of your brand because they BELIEVE in it. Highly satisfied partnerships lead to creative solutions, innovative campaigns, and mutual success and growth. Partner satisfaction KPIs measure your partners’ satisfaction and engagement with your program, resources, and overall collaboration.

• Partner Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how satisfied your partners are with their experience working with your organization. This partner metric indicates the health of the partner relationship, partner loyalty, and likelihood to recommend.
• Support Tickets & Resolution Times: Tracks the total number of support tickets per partner and the average time to resolve them.
• Churn Rate: Rate at which partners disengage or leave your program.

Consistently measuring partner satisfaction KPIs helps to identify pain points or areas where partners feel unsupported, uncover trends and patterns, and plan ways to strengthen relationships with these partners. For example, a high partner NPS can also be used to determine which partners are willing to collaborate with you by participating in case studies, new launches, and testing and implementing new programs and portals.