Partner Analytics: What It Is and How to Do It

For revops leaders, it’s not enough for your program to look like it’s working — you need to prove it through your partner analytics.

So, what do you track?

And once you know what to track, how do you build a reporting process you don’t dread completing every month or every quarter?

Keep reading to learn what partner analytics is, how to apply it in your program, and some best practices to adopt along the way.

What Is Partner Analytics?

Partner analytics takes a magnifying glass to your program, highlighting what channel, reseller, referral, or affiliate relationships are contributing to your overall business growth (or not).

You could measure partner contribution in terms of closed deals or referrals, but that may not paint the whole picture.

Partners can amplify your growth in myriad ways, from opening doors to new geos to improving customer retention through smooth implementations to boosting brand awareness. And when measuring performance, those metrics need to be taken into account as well.

Importantly, though, partners can’t do any of those things if:

• They don’t see value in your program
• They don’t know how to sell or launch your solution
• They don’t know where to go to get marketing materials

The best way to know whether they’re properly enabled and incentivized is to measure engagement in every aspect of your program. If partners aren’t actively participating the way you want them to — say, with regard to training — you should consider making some tweaks.

Where to Focus Your Partner Analytics

Monitoring highs and lows on a regular basis shows you where your program may be lacking and how to make it incrementally better over time. A robust partner analytics function pays special attention to:

Deal Registrations in Partner Analytics

When you think of partner reporting, the first place your mind likely goes is Deal Registration. After all, Deals are the way that partners directly drive revenue. To nip any problems with Deal Registration in the bud, keep a close eye on:

The number of Deal Registrations you get (# Deal Registrations)

If you notice that some types of partners or partners in a certain region are struggling to bring in new business, that could be an indicator that they need more enablement or your product or solution isn’t suited to their offering or geo.

How Often Deal Registrations Are Approved (% Approved Deal Registrations)

If your approval rate is low overall, it could be that you’re not communicating your ICP or your lead qualifications clearly enough.

How Often Deal Registrations Close (% Deal Registration Close Rate)

Sometimes partners have no trouble attracting leads but struggle to close them. If you find that pattern in your data early, you can pitch a more hands-on co-selling motion to ensure any new deal registrations that come in make their way across the finish line.

How Large Your Closed-Won Deal Registrations Are ($ Avg Closed Deal Registration Size)

If your partners are closing deals, but not enough to meet your company quota, you may need to institute a minimum deal size requirement, particularly if you typically sell to the enterprise. Closing small deals may be helpful in the short term. But selling smaller packages or selling into smaller companies can cause retention problems down the line.

A lower number of deal registrations overall may be because you’re making the process too onerous for partners. David Isola, Previous Director of Customer Engagement at Black Box, explains:

“We had a very antiquated deal reg process where we’d send PDFs back and forth via email. There was a lot of human interaction that didn’t need to be there, and so I sought a solution.

We used Channeltivity to streamline our deal registration process in a partner-facing, cloud-based portal. Just a few months after making the switch to an easier process, we increased our revenue by 10x.”

But that wasn’t the only benefit he got from digitizing the process. Requiring resellers, VARs, and channel partners to fill in more information about who they were selling to gave his team more insight into how they could better market to and serve their customers.

“Before, we could never really reach our end users. But now, we ask for more account and contact information in the deal reg process which not only puts us in a better position to communicate with partners but to communicate with our customers as well.”

Referrals (if applicable) in Partner Analytics

Not all programs offer compensation for partner referrals — especially in addition to Deal Registration. But if they are a part of your program, you’ll want to observe trends here, too. Just adjust the Deal Registration metrics to Referrals:

• # Referrals
• % Referral Close Rate
• $ Avg Closed Referral Deal Size

Segment by partner type, partner region, and then by individual partner to see if you can spot any interesting tendencies or gaps that need to be addressed. For example, maybe your commission rate for referrals is significantly lower than your competitors. That could lead to a lower number of submitted Referrals overall.

Lead Distributions in Partner Analytics

As we stated up top, partners won’t participate in a program that they don’t see value from. And if the Leads you’re passing their way aren’t up to snuff, they’re simply not going to act on them — and may even write off your program altogether.

To determine whether your Lead Distribution is working (and what you can do to fix it if it’s not), keep tabs on:

• How many Leads partners convert to real opportunities (% Leads converted). What do these Leads have in common? How can you send more of these to your partners?

• How long it takes for partners to accept Leads (Avg time in days). If it’s getting longer and longer, maybe partners perceive the quality of your Leads to be worse and worse. Or maybe those Leads are getting buried in emails. If that’s the case, you need a more straightforward, transparent way to share them with partners.

Marketing in Partner Analytics

Partners are an excellent way to get the word out about your products and services to new and existing audiences you want to reach. Motivating partners to spread the word can come in many forms — one of them is marketing development funds.

Each quarter or month, vendors allocate a portion of their budget to partner-led events and campaigns designed to reel in new customers. 

Besides tracking how many MDF requests are logged every month or every quarter (and by which partners), you’ll want to know if those strategies are working.

• If it’s an online campaign, what is the open rate?
• What about the click-through rate?
• Did it perform better or worse than previous campaigns?

If it was an event:

• How many people showed up?
• How many turned into leads?
• How many of those leads turned into real opportunities?

Helpful hint: Look for a PRM that allows you to track Deal Registrations that result from MDF activity.

Training & Certification in Partner Analytics

Training and certification programs not only enhance partner competence but also strengthen commitment to your brand. Vendors that invest in comprehensive training programs often see higher partner engagement, increased deal registrations, and better sales outcomes.

To get a sense of how your training program is running, stay on top of:

• Training completion rate (% Courses Completed/Total Attempts). Are there Courses that partners often start but never finish? What do you think is making them stuck, and how can you change that?

• Certification pass rate (% Pass/Total Attempts). Which quiz questions do most people get wrong? Can you adjust the phrasing? Maybe they need more Lessons catered to that product use case, feature, or value prop.

• Shares on social media (% Certifications Shared). Every time a partner posts about your certification on LinkedIn or adds it to their profile, your company gets a visibility boost. If you’re not seeing partners do this, it might be because they don’t know they can or forgot they could. Simple reminders can go a long way.

General Partner Activity in Partner Analytics

If partners aren’t engaging, you want to know that right away. If you have a partner portal, it’s easy to track logins, but that doesn’t tell you much about their experience with your program.

Dive a little bit deeper:

• If you send a partner newsletter, what are the open and click-through rates?
• If you have a Partner Resource Library, how many downloads is each piece getting?
• If you offer Co-Branded Collateral, are partners generating any? What assets do they co-brand most?

David notes,“Seeing what content our partners are pulling down from the Library and what Co-Branded Collateral they’re making tells us a lot about how effective our materials are, what industries might be most popular, and the types of content we don’t need to spend more time on since partners aren’t using it.”

He’s not the only one that’s found success in tracking detailed portal activity. When the team at Brother started looking more closely at their partner analytics — and exposing KPIs to their partners, they saw “double-digit sales growth in both gold and silver tiers.”

3 Best Practices For Nailing Your Partner Analytics

1. Establish a Reporting Cadence

The first step in making partner analytics a priority is to make it a habit.

Partner Analytics For Smaller Or Newly Launched Programs

Checking on partner program KPIs more regularly, like every few weeks or every month, makes it easier for you to:

• Find new opportunities
• Change parts of your program accordingly
• Measure that change right away

There are ways to speed up this process so it’s not adding too much more to your plate (more on that next). But if weekly reporting becomes too much of a hassle, you can always slow your cadence down.

Partner Analytics For Larger Or More Mature Programs

Programs that have a high volume of partners and have been around a long time don’t tend to make changes to their programs that often. Changes can confuse partners, and there may be a lot of associated updates — to their website, tiering structure, collateral, and requirements.

If you’re in that boat, it makes sense to open your aperture a bit and only run reports every quarter. Ideally, you’d pull them before your internal or external QBRs, so you have some time to pinpoint any major issues and come into your meetings having brainstormed ways to effect future change. 

2. Create Report Templates

If you have to build the same dashboard over and over, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Your partner analytics could go way faster (and be more accurate!) if you build and save custom reports.

If You’re Using Spreadsheets

Make a cover tab with all of your higher-level formulas, and have it pull data from other hidden tabs. Every time you need to crunch your numbers, make a copy of your existing sheet and replace the old data in the hidden tabs with fresh numbers. The cover tab will automatically repopulate.

If You’re Using a PRM

Set up reports for each module, and then use built-in pivot tables, map views, filters, and time charts to surface the data you want to see. Once it’s in the format you want, save your view so you can refresh the data and pull it in the exact same way each time.

3. Centralize Your Data In a PRM

At a certain point, trying to juggle data from your CRM, email, Slack, and random spreadsheets becomes untenable. Fragmentation leads to inefficiencies, reporting delays, and a lack of clarity on partner performance.

A partner relationship management platform (PRM) automatically tracks what activity is happening and when. Consolidating all of your relevant partner data and connecting it directly to data in Salesforce or HubSpot creates a single source of truth that improves visibility and decision-making.

Many PRMs come with native partner analytics functionality that makes it easy for admins to customize reports, save them, and run them whenever you need up-to-date insights on your program. The best ones make that data available for partners to see as well, showing them their progress and payouts over time.

Don’t Have a PRM Yet?

Have a PRM, but it doesn’t have the reporting capabilities you need?

Give Channeltivity a look. Channeltivity’s partner analytics features offer visibility into every aspect of your channel program — whether you are planning to report solely from within Channeltivity or push Channeltivity data to and from a CRM like Zoho, Dynamics, Salesforce, or HubSpot.

Fully customize activity reports for any module, save common views to share information with your team, and export partner program data whenever you need to. Per David:

“The control you have over Channeltivity’s back-end and its ease of use is what really stands out about the tool. I like the interface and the way I can make changes and build out our modules and reporting in real time. It’s very intuitive.”

Want to see it for yourself? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today.

Or, if you’re not ready, download our Partner Program KPIs list along with our other Channel University materials here.