I have just been handed partnerships as my job. What do I do in the first 90 days?
The short answer
Do not launch a program. Spend month one finding the five to ten companies that already show up inside your won deals, because your customers have already told you who your partners are. Month two, pick two of them and personally try to close one deal with each, doing all the work yourself rather than delegating to a portal. Month three, write down what happened, what the partner needed and what your own team could not deliver. That document is your program design, and it will beat any tier structure you could have invented in week one.
Go deeper, your way
4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
Why we picked it
Written by the industry body for partnership professionals, so it describes the job as practitioners actually experience it, including the reassurance that you do not need prior partnerships experience to do it well.
Why we picked it
A small company showing its own numbers: their partner manager took the program from under 4% to 10% of revenue in a year on 20% of his time, which is a realistic target to plan against.
Why we picked it
The closest thing partnerships has to a trade publication: account mapping tactics, co-sell plays and partner ops case studies, published weekly. Read it for the mechanics and discount the platform pitch.
Why we picked it
Makes the point most first timers miss: channel accelerates growth that already exists, it does not create it, and you should budget at least two months of work per partner after signing.
