Partner-sourced pipeline
Pipeline created by the partner — partner found the buyer, ran initial discovery, registered the deal. The incremental contribution; this is what the program adds.
06.6 · Partner Measurement
What to count, and what to refuse to count.
The board deck should have three separate lines: partner-sourced, partner-influenced, and partner-fulfilled. Conflating them into one "channel revenue" line inflates contribution and corrupts the forecast.
The nine metrics
Three pipeline measurements + six program-health measurements. Reported separately. None of them substitutes for any other.
Partner-influenced pipeline
Pipeline progressed by the partner on existing deals — technical validation, executive intro, deployment commitment. Reported separately from sourced. Different metric, different management lens.
Partner-fulfilled ARR
ARR transacted through partner paper regardless of who sourced. Procurement-velocity contribution; not demand creation. Keep separate from sourced ARR in board reporting.
Attach rate
Percentage of deals where the partner sells attached services (implementation, ongoing operations, tuning). Services attach is one of the four conditions; if attach is below 30%, the partner has no economic reason to lead with the product.
Activation rate
Percentage of recruited partners producing measurable activity in 90 days. The single best diagnostic of recruitment quality. Below 30% = the recruitment funnel is broken.
MDF ROI
Pipeline + closed-won attributable per dollar of MDF spent. Tagged at the campaign level so the next cycle has data to inform allocation. Programs that don't measure this default to vanity allocation.
Certification completion
Per-partner depth + breadth of sales / technical / deployment certifications. Tied to program tier so it has economic weight. Without that link, certification is a passive credential collector's hobby.
Win rate by partner
Closed-won / total registered, per partner. Surfaces the 10% of partners producing 80% of revenue and the long tail to cull at the next program review.
Renewal rate by partner
Net retention of deals the partner sourced or fulfilled. The truest measure of partner deployment quality — bad implementations show up here 12 months later.
What to refuse to count
Consolidated channel revenue without separation. A board deck showing "$48M channel-sourced ARR" that actually combines $12M true partner-sourced + $20M partner-influenced + $16M partner-fulfilled deals the direct team closed is not measurement. It's narrative.
Logo count without activation. 400 partners signed, 36 actually producing — the second number is the program. The first is the marketing slide.
MDF spend as a proxy for results. "We spent $2.3M in MDF this quarter" is an input metric. The output metric — pipeline and closed-won attributable per MDF dollar — is what the next cycle needs to allocate.
If a board cannot tell you what fraction of ARR is partner-sourced versus partner-influenced versus partner-fulfilled, the partner program is unmeasured — no matter how impressive the consolidated number looks.