Get behind the scenes of your partner program.
Discover why partners went dormant, what would get them selling again, and what it would take to recruit the ones you’ve never reached.
“Fedor and OTN's research showed us there was more partner demand than we were set up to handle. That's what pushed us to build a team around it.”
Most partner programs treat an activation problem as a recruitment problem.
When a partner program misses its number, the answer is usually more partners. So, more partners get recruited, and they go quiet for the same reasons the old ones did. The program gets bigger and the number stays where it was.
Four groups of people could tell you why.
Your own active partners
They'll tell you the truth if you ask well. Run it as a study and their answers compare against each other, instead of stacking up as separate opinions.
Partners in someone else's ecosystem
Agencies already building on another platform. A call gets you one yes or no. It won't get you the reasoning, from enough of them to see a pattern.
Your own dormant partners
They know exactly where the program stalled, because it stalled on them. They also stopped opening your emails eight months ago, and the portal survey isn't changing that.
Firms that have never partnered with anyone
Agencies and consultancies that could build a service line on your product. Nobody has asked them what would make it worth doing, so the answer sits there, unclaimed.
We run studies partners want answered too.
Every study is built on questions partners genuinely care about: where their market is going, what programs like yours actually offer, how they compare to their peers. And everyone who answers watches the live results come in as the study runs. That is the incentive, and it changes who shows up.
The right people answer
An agency founder will give twenty minutes to a study about her own market, with a live read on how she stacks up against the programs she competes with. So the respondents are the operators your number depends on, including the ones who've never heard of you.
We surface their voice
Partners have things they want heard: what the program gets wrong, what would make it worth more of their business. For many of them, our study is the first time anyone asked. What they say becomes your target list, your win-back play, and partner content that reads like someone listened.
Three ways in. One order of operations.
Recruiting into a leaking program burns the recruits. Writing enablement for partners you should never have signed burns the enablement. So we start where the evidence points, not where the budget line says.
Program Reads
Short, single-question studies on the program you already run. One read, one answer, one decision.
See the four reads
Every read ends in a segmented list, the objections verbatim, and a named next move. Not a report card. Something you can walk into leadership with.
The Recruitment Study
For the leader with a recruitment target and a population that won't pick up. We map who's out there, run the research they'll actually answer, and come back with what would make them join.
You walk away with the segmented target list, the screening criteria in partners' own words, the message that moves them, and the conversations the study already opened. And if the evidence says the bet needs to change, you hear it from us with the data attached: go, pivot, or refine. Never a guess with a deck around it.
You also get a version you can publish. The findings, written up as a report for your site and as posts for LinkedIn, with your name on the research. Partners who ignore recruitment emails read industry data about their own market, so the study keeps recruiting after it ends.
Partner Enablement
We help your partners sell by automating the content they need and never get around to writing. Landing pages and articles on their own sites, selling your product to their own clients, in their voice. A hundred partners means a hundred sets of content, not one template with the logo swapped.
What you get
Your team defines the inputs, and as the roster grows, the system grows with it.
monday.com asked whether the partner demand was real. It was bigger than the program.
Their partner GTM team had a recruitment target, a defined population of candidate partners, and no read on what would make any of them join. Calls get you one answer at a time. They needed the pattern.
We studied 100 CRM partners across North America, most of them five years deep in someone else's program. What came back changed the plan. The response wasn't a bigger campaign. It was a new team.
“Fedor and OTN's research showed us there was more partner demand than we were set up to handle. That's what pushed us to build a team around it.”
This is a founder brand, I make the call with you.
I spent years as a partnership manager inside a program built on a bet nobody had tested. The ideal partner profile changed weekly. The risk sat with the people executing. The market never behaved the way the plan assumed, and I found out the way most partner leaders do: through the quarters it cost.
OTN exists to move that discovery earlier. Before the recruitment budget, before the hires, before the year is spent. When we work together, you work with me directly, on evidence from the exact partners your number depends on.
Put your partner number on the table. 30 minutes.
Bring the target, the program, and what you've tried. We'll locate where it's actually stuck: recruitment, reactivation, or activation. If research would change your next move, we'll show you how. If it wouldn't, we'll tell you that too. You leave with a sharper read on the number either way.
Book a call