Your Partner Program Is Targeting the Wrong People

For ten years, the partner channel has been the single largest source of revenue for Union Square Consulting. Not marketing, not outbound, not referrals from happy customers. Partners. And for most of those ten years, Eddie was reaching out to the wrong ones. Thousands of conversations with partners who looked right on paper but never sent a single deal. It took years of trial and error to land on the three criteria that actually predict whether a partner will deliver. And if any one of those is missing, it's a waste of everyone's time. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down how to define your ideal partner profile with the same rigor you'd put into your ICP. The conversation covers the three criteria that separate partners who send deals from partners who send pleasantries, how to think about partner benefit when there's no revenue share in the equation, why even internal partners at companies like Salesforce and Wells Fargo compete for mindshare the same way external ones do, and how to operationalize your IPP into a continuously improving system that actually drives revenue. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 01:25 - Why we don't talk about the partner channel enough 02:38 - The three criteria for an ideal partner 06:28 - Why direct benefit matters more than revenue share 09:24 - Wells Fargo: 186 lines of business, 35 business cards, zero mindshare 10:11 - Salesforce: internal partners competing for attention 11:31 - Why $500 in quota relief doesn't move the needle 14:37 - Where people go wrong defining their partner profile 21:21 - What enablement for partners actually looks like 22:14 - The La Bernardine dinner story 31:37 - AI for keeping your ideal partner profile current 37:15 - How to measure whether your partner program is worth it 45:24 - Turning the IPP into a continuous improvement system _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok