Incentives and offers for partners: | Description: | Increases programs success by: | Examples: |
Extended support for partners | Direct phone numbers, account manager, Slack… | 5% | 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% | 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% | https://directory.partnerprograms.io/ |
Robust and indexed profiles that show off the skills or use cases of your partner | 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] | https://databox.com/partner/pepperland-marketing |
Free accounts | The ability to give away free accounts (with limitations) to partners or their clients. | 15% | 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% | 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] | Here’s a great example from Heap: https://heap.io/resources/paving-the-funnel-scott-breitenother |