Advice for Building and Managing a Technology Partner Program
In this discussion, Chris Lavoie, Technology Partnerships Lead at Gorgias, shares practical advice with Liz Garcia, Community Manager of the SaaS Ecosystem Alliance, on building and managing a technology partner program. Chris recounts how Gorgias grew from a one-person partnerships team to a six-person team that launched an app marketplace with 75+ integrations and became a million-dollar ARR channel in under two years.
Building Out a Technology Partnerships Team
Chris emphasizes that justifying team growth requires demonstrating revenue opportunity and accurately measuring impact. For tech partnerships, ROI extends beyond direct revenue to include effects on churn, NPS, customer satisfaction, and retention. He advises starting simple by identifying a few high-opportunity partners where integration usage is strong and there's a compelling story to tell. Nailing the playbook with these initial partners first allows you to justify expanding headcount.
Hiring for Technology Partner Manager Roles
When hiring tech partner managers, Chris prioritizes soft skills over technical expertise alone. Key attributes include:
- Curiosity and excitement about product integrations and their transformative effect on growth
- Business savvy and comfort in client-facing environments
- Willingness to travel and extreme ownership mentality
- Marketing mindset and ability to tell integration stories through content and public speaking
He notes that tech partnerships essentially function as a product marketing channel, making marketing background or curiosity a significant advantage. Chris builds a diverse team rather than seeking one-size-fits-all candidates, adapting roles to individual strengths. Some team members excel at partner evangelism and sales support, while others thrive in process and program-building roles.
Key Performance Indicators and Metrics
Gorgias measures partner managers on closed revenue sourced from partners, not just pipeline generation. This unorthodox approach keeps partner managers involved throughout the entire sales cycle and incentivizes cooperation on late-stage deals. Chris trains his team to understand pipeline metrics at a manager level, tracking:
- Deals added from partners
- Average deal size and close rates
- Sales cycle length trends
Beyond revenue, Chris highlights the need to measure integration impact on broader business goals. Gorgias has found that customers using five and a half integrations show significantly reduced churn. Other valuable metrics include correlation between specific integrations and NPS scores, customer satisfaction, average deal size, and sales cycle length reduction.
Cross-Functional Collaboration with Product and Engineering
Successful alignment requires establishing relationships high within product and engineering organizations. Chris focuses on understanding their goals, measurement criteria, and long-term vision, then articulating partnerships' objectives. When requesting native integrations, he presents clear business cases and demonstrates how integrations extend product value. Crucially, he "screams from the rooftops" about successes to make these teams feel like true stakeholders.
Regular cadence meetings with sub-teams maintain alignment. The integration QA team handles partner application triage and testing, while product marketing receives context on which integrations deserve go-to-market focus.
Prioritizing Tech Partners and Resource Investment
For new partnerships, Gorgias uses Crossbeam for secure account mapping, examining three key data points:
- Mutual customer base (confirms overlapping markets)
- Partners' customers matching Gorgias' prospects (shows TAM for partner)
- Gorgias' customers matching partners' prospects (reveals revenue opportunity)
Additional signals include existing integration usage, partner program maturity, and dedicated partnership personnel. Partners lacking these elements enter a non-managed "certified" bucket with resource access by invitation only.
For existing partners, Chris conducts monthly and quarterly audits, categorizing them into three buckets:
- Overperforming: Accelerate success with additional resources
- Underperforming: Determine if trends are temporary or require deprioritization
- On track: Maintain current investment levels
Quarterly business reviews with top partners inform reprioritization decisions, with tough choices made to cool off relationships that no longer align strategically.
Co-Marketing and Revenue Share Considerations
Co-marketing opportunities increasingly factor into partnership decisions. Being featured on major app marketplaces like Klaviyo's provides significant SEO and organic marketing benefits. Chris tracks event performance data, maintaining a "blacklist" of partners who promise but fail to deliver on marketing commitments.
Regarding revenue share, Chris argues it should only be used when it's the necessary lever to achieve desired results. Gorgias rarely engages in tech partner revenue shares, reserving them for one-sided referral scenarios. For agency partnerships, revenue share is the primary lever, but tech partners typically demand direct referral relationships. The focus should be on creating balanced value exchange rather than defaulting to revenue share agreements.
Future Trends and Challenges in SaaS Tech Partnerships
The biggest challenge Chris identifies is maximizing value from app marketplaces beyond commercial metrics. He advocates for deeper product marketing storytelling with specific data—not vague claims about integration benefits, but concrete metrics like "this integration unlocks an 18.7% increase in conversion rates by doing XYZ." This granular understanding of impact on shared customers, combined with internal and partner evangelization, drives more sustainable growth than surface-level activities.
Looking ahead, Chris predicts increased co-selling, partner influence, and joint selling through OEM white-label approaches. Rather than direct involvement in every deal, partners will sell solutions as embedded add-ons, collecting payment through connected systems like Stripe and back-channeling revenue. This model, common in more mature industries and larger e-commerce companies, represents the future direction for SaaS partnerships.
Chris Lavoie can be reached at chris@gorgias.com or on LinkedIn for further discussion on partnerships topics.
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