When Your Partner Program Lacks Clear Goals
When a reseller program lacks well-defined goals or KPIs, problems quickly trickle down. Lack of clarity from the top down often manifests in several key ways that partners can feel directly.
Watch out for the following warning signs:
1. Partner Confusion
Partners make frequent mistakes or frequently ask basic questions about which products to sell, in which territories to operate, or how to prioritize opportunities.
Inconsistent or insufficient direction often leads to confusion.
2. Difficulty Measuring Success
If you can’t answer the question, “What does good performance look like?” you likely haven’t set clear enough goals. Without defined goals, there is no reliable way for you or your partners to determine success or even to know where to focus their efforts.
How can you determine whether a partner has cleared the bar for performance if you haven’t set one?
3. Wasted Resources
Some waste is inevitable, but too much waste can cause major delays in the sales process.
Signs of waste include: sales and marketing assets go unused, you roll out trainings that your partners feel they don’t need, or your partners are burning sales cycles on trial-and-error rather than executing against a clear playbook.
4. Performance Gaps
Your internal sales team meets expectations, but partner results lag behind.
The more significant the gap here, the more likely it’s caused by your internal sales team having clear, established goals, while your partner program has unclear goals.
The Solution to Unclear Goals in a Partner Program
Many companies skip this step in the planning process, but it's important.
Spend dedicated time defining clear goals for both your overall program, and for your individual partners. Map out when they should use specific assets and how they should engage. Then, ensure you have a clear communication strategy and shared goals that empower your partners with confidence and the knowledge of exactly what is expected of their team.
When Your Partners Aren't Motivated to Sell Your Product
Partners need to be motivated to sell your product. Even in the best-designed partner programs, without motivation, a partner is not going to be willing to put in the effort.
A lack of motivation can show up in the following ways:
5. Partner Inactivity
You may notice that many of your partners are inactive: they rarely launch campaigns, never log into the portal, and aren’t generating a significant number of sales.
Maintaining inactive partners can drain your resources without producing results.
6. Partner Radio Silence Immediately After Onboarding
This is far more abrupt than just inactivity.
Partners seem enthusiastic during onboarding, but soon go quiet. Your emails start to go unanswered, calls see low attendance or are frequently rescheduled, and momentum fades before the partner gains any real traction.
7. Exceedingly Long Sales Cycles
Things may be moving along initially, and then they slow down or even grind to a halt.
You may start to see that some partners have longer-than-average sales cycles compared to your internal sales team. Often this indicates partners don’t see enough value or urgency to prioritize your product in their sales strategy.
The Solution to a Lack of Motivated Reseller Partners
A successful partnership is a two-way street. If your partners don't feel rewarded for their efforts, they won't put in the work to prioritize your product.
Revisit your incentive structure to see where you can boost motivation. An inadequate incentive structure can demotivate your partners, leading to fewer leads and lower conversion rates. But by providing clear, attainable, and rewarding incentives, you can ensure your partners remain engaged and productive.
When Your Reseller Enablement Efforts Are Falling Short
Even the best sales reps can’t sell effectively without the right training and resources.
If your partner enablement is lacking, you might see these signs:
8. Customers Contact Your Team for Help Directly
If customers who typically speak with your partners start coming to your tech support team with questions your partners should have been able to answer, it’s a clear sign of a knowledge gap.
9. Partners Demonstrate Knowledge Gaps
Instead of partners selling your product confidently, they may stumble on basic details, answer customer questions incorrectly in demos, or make errors when showcasing your products.
This creates friction in the sales cycle and undermines customer trust.
10. Consistently Underwhelming Sales Performance:
Your partners are showing effort without effectiveness.
If they try and consistently fail to meet targets, your partners could lack the knowledge of the target customer or lack the confidence to position your product.
11. Customer Complaints About Partners:
Frequent customer complaints and negative feedback about about partners, such as missed details, poor service, or incorrect information, can be a sign that they lack the proper training to handle certain inquiries or issues.
The Solution to Weak Partner Enablement
Partners are busy; they won’t always take the time to learn about your product on their own. It’s up to you, the vendor, to provide them with the tools and training to sell effectively.
Providing comprehensive training (enablement that’s ongoing and doesn’t just stop at onboarding) will make your products easier to sell. The easier you make your product to sell, the more your partners will sell it.
Be sure to also collect feedback from your partners and data on the program. Use this to continue to update the assets and program to make it more effective.
When Your Sales Channels Conflict
Channel conflict happens when your internal sales team and reseller partners compete for the same customers, deals, or territories, creating friction that can damage trust and revenue.
Channel conflicts are bound to happen when you begin selling through partners. While you can’t prevent every clash, it’s crucial to know the signs of a larger issue.
12. Partners Express Dissatisfactions
This is a fairly easy to spot sign: your partners may openly express issues they have with your program, which can signal underlying conflicts.
13. Duplicate Outreach to the Same Accounts/Deal Disputes
You see that your internal sales team is reaching out to the same accounts and competing with partners during the sales cycle.
This can potentially cause the customer to choose the internal team, or the deal to fall through due to confusion over conflicting outreach.
14. Partners Have a High Churn Rate
Partners are leaving your program for competitors. They may or may not tell you that these competitors have better-defined channel programs.
15. Reduced Partner Margins
Partners start lowering prices, which will leads to reduced margin and incentive, and ultimately deprioritization of your product.
Partners often reduce prices and cut their margin when they are forced to work in the same space as your internal sales team. They feel they need to either undercut prices or shorten their margins to remain competitive.
The Solution to Conflicting Sales Channels
Channel conflict often feels like it’s all about specific one-off deals (losing a deal, disputes over a deal’s attribution, or undercutting margin in certain cases), when the biggest issue is really long-term trust.
When your sales team sells against your partners, it begins a competitive pricing spiral that disrupts revenue and ultimately discourages partners. Once a partner learns they lost a deal because your own sales team undercut them, they will be demotivated to sell your product in the future, costing you many future deals with that partner.
Ensure there are clear, concise territories outlined for both your sales team and partners, and create processes that encourage working with your partners instead of against them.
When You Run the Risk of Over-Reliance on One Single Partner
Having a high-performing partner is a great asset, but relying too heavily on a single partner can expose your entire channel strategy to significant risk.
If this partner were to fail, or use their leverage, your business would be left vulnerable.
Here are some ways to know you’re over-reliant on a single partner:
16. Concentration of Customer Acquisition
A high-performing partner is worth celebrating and may not raise any red flags at first. But it becomes an issue when too many of your new customers are being acquired through a single partner, while your own customer base remains small.
A good rule of thumb: according to Allianz Trade, if any single partner accounts for more than 20% of your revenue, it should be considered high concentration.
17. Loss of Control
Your top partner may start to dictate how the sales process runs or how customers are treated.
If they have the leverage to do so, and you don’t feel you have the ability to intervene, you are over-reliant on a single partner.
18. Partner Resentment
Other partners may complain about favoritism and how that harms their business, sales process, and income. This undermines their motivation to invest in your program.
The Solution to Over-Reliance on a Single Reseller Partner
By cultivating a diverse portfolio of partners, you're not just expanding your reach; you're also protecting your business.
This approach ensures your company's stability, even if a high-performing partner faces a setback. Additionally, it fosters a balanced, mutually beneficial relationship with every partner, rather than risking a single partner holding your business hostage. This ensures healthier, more sustainable growth.
The Path to a Healthier SaaS Channel Strategy
A channel strategy can be one of the most powerful and effective tools for a SaaS vendor’s go-to-market strategy, but only if it’s built with clarity, motivation, proper enablement, trust, and balance.
By proactively addressing these challenges, you can turn potential pitfalls into opportunities.
The result is a healthier partner program that not only survives, but thrives, becoming a powerful driver or growth for your business.
Ready to Reach a Network of Trusted Partners?
You need both the right strategy and the right technology. Learn how getting listed on Apptium’s Cloud Commerce Platform can connect you with reseller partners around the globe, handling end-to-end commerce to make your partner program easier to manage.
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