Consider that we’ve just been through the theoretical part of this course. Now how do we practically measure these KPIs?

Many Partnership professionals do well on measuring partner sales performance KPIs thanks to CRM / PRM capabilities in the market that enable you to attach partner details and activities to Opportunity records.

However as I mentioned, your partners need to stay motivated in their ongoing relationship with you. There might be occasions, especially at the beginning of the partnership or during dips in the market, where you might not see sales outcomes immediately. It might be a slow burn till you see fruitful results. So making sure that your partners feel valued and know that their activities are being acknowledged will benefit both of you in the long run.

This is where the partner scorecard comes in. If you’ve done Business Studies in college or some form of competitive sport, a scorecard might mean something to you already. In short, a scorecard presents the progress over time of KPIs against specified goals and targets.

Partner scorecards enables Partnership Managers to have a standardized framework to structure their performance conversations with partners, to help them understand how they are tracking against expectations, and to compare their relative performance with similar partners.

Without this type of measurement framework you could fall into the trap of either:

• Just focusing on partner activities, and dismissing their impact on sales performance
• Or just looking at the sales figures, and dismissing other valuable aspects of the partnership
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Here’s how it works:
‍(Want to cut to the chase? Feel free to speed the video up by 1.2x or 1.5x)

You can think of the scorecard as having multiple layers. Getting more and more specific as you go down.

1. There are four categories (Yep you guessed it, the ones we’ve covered previously), with subcategories that sit underneath.
2. Within the subcategories you have corresponding KPIs.
3. Under each KPI, there are two sections: KPI ranges and their respective scores.
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Calculate the score for each partnership KPI, and it all rolls up to an overall partner score. You can even compare scores to see:

• The partner’s progress over time
• How it compares to other partners in the same region
  / industry / tier

Whatever view is more helpful for your company’s goals.

By all means, customize the template to what makes sense for your business. Remove any subcategories that don’t apply to how you work with your partners.

Now armed with this measurement framework, the next challenge is reporting all the great results you’re seeing back to the business.