---
title: "Uncover Partnership Metrics"
episode: 21
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Bernardo Alves"
guest_title: "Engagement Manager, LeanScale"
date_published: 2023-08-29
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:06:45
word_count: 1181
topics: ["revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership", "forecasting"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-partnership-metrics/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Uncover Partnership Metrics — Full Transcript

> Episode 21 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Bernardo Alves.
> Published August 29, 2023 · 00:06:45 · 1,181 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-partnership-metrics/

## 00:00 — Cold open: track your cost-to-carry

**[0:00]** You absolutely have to be tracking your cost-to-carry ratios for a partner, because I guarantee when you sit down to do your growth model and capacity plan, partnerships is going to have a really strong portion of that plan, and you can't expect it to just scale infinitely.

## 00:25 — Partnerships: the most overlooked department for metrics

**[0:25]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening.

## 00:37 — Metric 1: partner production

**[0:37]** We're going through one of the most overlooked departments when it comes to metrics. We're talking about partnerships today. Bernardo, for partnerships, what's the first metric we need to be looking at? I think the first one, and we're going to start real easy with this one because, as you mentioned, it is often overlooked, is just understanding overall and by partner production. Typically, when we're talking about production, what we mean here is how much pipeline is being sourced from these partners and how much are you winning from these partners and partnership as a whole.

## 01:10 — Reseller vs. referral production goals

**[1:10]** Yeah, there's usually two layers of partnership. You might have one that is a channel reseller, and for a partner like that, you're really going to want to look at production, and you should have production goals segmented by partner. If you have a partner that may create some cannibalization opportunities or they're really more of a referral partner, then usually you're going to want to have a production goal of sales qualified leads that will be provided to the sales team to move and close.

**[1:41]** But regardless of your partnership ecosystem and what it looks like, you have to have goals to some form of production, whatever makes sense for your company. Absolutely. And if you have multiple partner channels, if you have reseller and referral relationships, measure them independently. They're going to have different objectives, different goals, and different considerations that you're going to want to keep track of. What's the second metric partnership teams? We'll get that. What's the second metric partnerships teams need to be measuring?

## 02:13 — Metric 2: cost-to-carry ratio

**[2:13]** Yeah, you should absolutely keep an eye on cost to carry ratio. So understanding how much it costs to run your partnerships teams and breaking that further down into how much of it is operational in terms of overhead and things that you're not going to have an impact on. And then breaking it down by what's the variable cost per partner? What events are we hosting? How can we influence the cost and what impact does it have on production of partnerships? Keeping an eye out on that is really important.

## 02:43 — Bake partnerships into the growth model

**[2:43]** You absolutely have to be tracking your cost to carry ratios for a partner, because I guarantee when you sit down to do your growth model and capacity plan, partnerships is going to have a really strong portion of that plan. And you can't expect it to just scale infinitely. You don't build one relationship and expect it to completely take off. You always need to be nurturing those partnerships and investing in them to make sure they're successful. So bake that into your plan. Understand what sales, marketing, partner manager resources you need in order to make them and yourself successful.

**[3:17]** Yeah, it's really important to keep an eye out on how much you spend in order to get from that partner, right? You might have a partner that is performing really well, but then when you look at the cost, you're actually sinking a lot of your resources into it, whereas another one might be underdeveloped and there's an opportunity to get more money into building that relationship and extracting more value out of that. What else do partnership teams need to be measuring, Bernardo?

## 03:45 — Metric 3: cannibalization rate

**[3:45]** I think a really important one to keep track of is cannibalization rate. And this isn't something that you should keep track of in order to chastise the team or anything like that. But we know that a lot of times the relationship that you're going to have with a partner might be competing with the relationship that you have with a customer on a direct basis.

**[4:04]** So understanding what your exposure is in terms of what deals did I gain access to that I wouldn't otherwise have if we didn't lose 5% of value by working with this partner and giving them a cut of a deal that you might have been able to win direct, but it might not have opened other doors up for you.

## 04:24 — Tracking cannibalization and its cost

**[4:24]** You definitely have to be looking at strategic moves you can play with a partner and when it's just not healthy for the business. So if you track it, a good way to track this is how many opportunities were already registered in a direct channel that ended up moving to a partner channel and what discount or referral fees did you have to pay for that and what's the cost of that cannibalization?

**[4:48]** It's really important to understand that you definitely will have to make concessions in order to build strategic relationships, but there's a limit to it and understanding where that limit is is going to be really helpful to make sure you have a good relationship with the partner and it's not cannibalizing too much of your direct business.

## 05:04 — Both parties must leave successful

**[5:04]** And I think you hit the nail on the head there, right? This is a metric that allows you to have strategic and meaningful conversations with your partner. The overall point of a partnership is for both parties to leave successful. If it's coming at the expense of your business or their business, it's not going to lead to something that you're going to have a fruitful relationship in the long run. So being able to balance that and have those conversations backed by data in order to set everybody up for a successful venture together, you're going to have a good relationship with your partner.

## 05:37 — Recap: the three metrics

**[5:37]** I couldn't agree more. So if you're running a partnerships team or you're working in a partnerships team, the three metrics you have to be measuring, you have to be looking at your production rates to goal. Typically, that's going to be closed one deals to goal or SQLs or opportunities to goal. Next, you're going to want to be looking at your cost to carry a partner ratio. How much resource do you have to invest in order to make sure that that partner is well invested in and taken care of and being productive for the company?

**[6:06]** And the last one, track your cannibalization rate. Make sure you're looking at what direct deals were already registered within your CRM ended up moving to partners. And are you okay with that cost? There will be a cost, but is it at the level that you believe creates a healthy relationship with the partner and is beneficial to the business? Bernardo, thanks for going through these with me today. My pleasure, Anthony. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like the discussion, please like share and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.