Which incentives actually increase the attractiveness of a partner program and how much they can impact program KPIs.

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Referral commissions are only valuable when the agency has referred a decent number of clients. And for most of your programs, that may never become the hook for your program. Agencies need to be incentivized to join now - what's in it for them today. Those immediate incentives are what impact the growth of your partner program in the first 6 months.

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This is a thought exercise for leadership to go through with their brand new partnerships team before determining revenue predictions, budgeting and when/what for revenue quotas.

Outside of your product’s feature / benefits / support / integrations which are attractive to users, your partner programs incentives are what make ‘partnering’ attractive, and therefore is your partner teams ammunition for growing the program. The more ammunition you give them (incentives), the faster the program will gain new partners and convert referred accounts from current partners.

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What’s really attractive to agencies?

These first few are “table stakes” – they will be decided on before the agency replies to your first message:

“Table Stakes” for what gets checked off before a new partner even considers your program:

• Alignment – the agencies that you want to work with are aligned with your values, they have a great reputation and deliver on their promises.
• Product – while this is clear on your side what are examples of packages that other partners have created around your product that are getting results for clients and are profitable.
• Price point – Is it competitive – can it be profitable – is there margin for commission?  

If all of the above boxes are checked, then the conversation and program sale can proceed to the value of being a partner.

Free and sponsored co-marketing (see email example below)

• [Sponsored] MDF funds – marketing development funds
• “I have budget for the right opportunities to co-market with my partners.”
• Use “I” not “We” so the agency knows they are talking to the right person. Even if you have to get approval, maintain control over that partnership so your agencies do not feel they are wasting time getting on calls with you.
• [Free] Highlights in the blog
• MUST BE A DO-FOLLOW BACKLINK – do not mention this highlight if your marketing team will not make their backlink do-follow.
• [Free] White Label Decks

Referrals

• Having an SOP for taking users and introducing them to agencies.
• Shared pipeline – closed lost leads intros to agencies.
• Implementation partner track – if they become an expert, what’s in it for them in terms of referrals?
• Directory listing:
• GOOD directory example – highlights the agency, expertise, examples, backlink, their own landing page…
• BAD example = DOMO – no unique pages, everyone is on the same page which makes it hard to find agencies for their traffic…
• An actual profile for your partners – a landing page on your domain

Free accounts and pass-through discounts

• To enable them to sell your product, they have to be power users first.
• And, agencies should not be asked to pay to learn how your solution works.
• Creating a product-level check in the new account signup for URL tokens or coupon codes from partners, and apply a discount to that users’ account if/when they use a partners’ code.

Sales support

• Sales process templates
• Leads and good quality leads

Training

• Training on how to sell, service and market – make these short and effective

Commissions

• More important will be where the agency can make a good profit on service

Now, here’s the thought exercise to help your team align on the true value of the various incentives for agency referral, implementation and reseller partners:

*Note: the column showing increase in program success is purely a rough estimate based on the impact that incentive has on the attractiveness of the program.

Examples oof incentives and weight:

Extended support for partners: Direct phone numbers, account manager, Slack… +5%

e.g. Zapier only provides phone support for their expert partner agencies, not the end user. This ensures the partner is valuable for the end user at all times.

A Marketing Develop Fund (MDF): A monthly budget to promote with and sponsor partners’ content or events. +15%

e.g. Any budget the partner team is free to allocate how they feel is best, and they choose to earmark some for sponsoring partner content.

Owning their partner directory: As opposed to a static directory which product manages, use a subdomain with it’s own CMS built specifically for partnerships (like APIdeck.com) and let partnerships manage it. +10%

e.g. https://directory.partnerprograms.io/

Full-page profiles on your directory: This goes above a directory and is more of a product-driven setup where partner profile have sections showing what they do with your product and their other tool expertise. +5%-10% [Depends if users can onboard starting with a partners’ template]

e.g. https://databox.com/partner/pepperland-marketing

Free accounts: The ability to give away free accounts (with limitations) to partners or their clients. +15%

e.g. https://partnerprograms.io/resources/free-saas-for-our-agency-friends/

Pass-through discounts partners can give those they refer: Their referral link triggering a discount for the user – this gives the partners’ referral a good reason to use their link or code. +5%

e.g. Unbounce does this with success.

Co-marketing content calendar: A spot in the content calendar for partner-sourced content. +15-25%. [Depends on frequency and type]

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Here are some more examples of incentives we find in the top partner programs:

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*Note: the column showing increase in program success is purely a rough estimate based on the impact that incentive has on the attractiveness of the program.

Maddy Martin of Smith.ai gave us her list of highest-impact incentives for partner teams: 

“The largest impact revenue/account-volume the highest are: 25% ease of onboarding, 50% portal to check on their accounts (often it's a non-starter), and 25% allowing them to set their margins/mark-up (within reason). Sensitivities vary by agency type; how well staffed they are, how attentive to details they are, how experienced they are in working with products like yours, and - most of all - how impactful your product promises to be on their bottom line and their clients' results (read: happiness & retention). Regardless, be on the lookout for onboarding flubs, portal feature requests, and other business-stalling. 

The largest impact to partner activation (getting the partner to bring in their first client, initiating the first revenue-generating activity) is 20% offering extended free services and 80% featuring them (with MDF, backlinks, co-webinars... with the latter being the most impactful and evergreen with a recording, email list & accompanying blog recap). The huge programs take ages to pay attention to you and take action. If you have a smaller SaaS company or product, showing attention is sometimes the most surprising and positive thing you can do. It's not often your vendor trots you out, but smaller companies can use attention as an almost unfair competitive advantage. 

The largest impact to ongoing revenue has little to do with what you offer. It has more to do with:

1. How easy you are to work with, 
2. How little extra work you add for them, 
3. Your positive impact on clients' successes,
4. The praise they receive from their clients as a result of what your product/service generated. 

The positive partnership litmus test is: Are you making them look great and helping them generate more revenue from their clients? That's #1 all day long. A few bonus points if you replaced a poor-performing product. And  bonus points if you opened up a net-new revenue stream.”

To get all of the strategies, join The Partner Programs Accelerator >>

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Next steps:

1. Take that data and have a team meeting to align on agency needs and creative ways to fulfill them. Include co-marketing schedule/options, what you do with your stale lost leads in terms of referring them to agencies… anything you can do to build the relationship.
2. Now, test those assumptions. Create a survey to find out what your agencies care about. Here’s one we did for AudioEye on ADA compliance: https://airtable.com/shrBHOYxAjYFURAmy
3. Put together your landing page. Great example – the page and incentives section of Justcall’s partner program: https://justcall.io/hubspot-agency-partner-program‍
4. Look at the URL – focused on one persona
5. Check the incentives section – in particular – the co-marketing and highlighting of their partners:

• Co-marketing Opportunities – We will do quarterly co-marketing activities with our HubSpot agency partners. Co-marketing activities include webinars, twitter chat, videos/podcasts, PR, case studies & more.”
• “Extra Visibility – Every HubSpot agency partner will get extra visibility on JustCall in the form of a logo on our partners program, a dedicated page about your services and a blog post announcing our partnership.”
• Backstory is – their marketing manager pushed hard for an agency partnerships initiative because he did not see it happening in their space for agencies.
• Every day he wakes up and checks the usage of agency-clients/partners on the platform have usage spikes. Then, he reaches out to them to offer the agency to upgrade their client to annual through them as the partner.
• This became the largest deal in the companies history.

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