Four Partner Programmes, one slide. A diagnostic for boards and CROs.

Most growth-stage SaaS partner programmes are announcements, not architectures. Four partner types get named on a slide. One CRO owns all of them. One partner-sourced ARR number gets carried to the board. Nobody at the executive table can say which archetype is relieving which growth constraint, or which two the business has decided to build and which two it is deliberately not.

This paper is a diagnostic. Twelve markers, grouped into three components: Ownership and Reporting, Enablement and Compensation, and Board-Facing Signals. Each marker is a two-option pair. Pick the one that matches your business today. The score tells you how much conflation sits inside the programme and where the rebuild needs to start.

It does not tell you how to recruit more partners. It does not tell you whether your rev-share is right. It tells you whether your operating model can distinguish between a referral partner and a co-sell partner, between an ISV and an alliance, and whether your board can see the difference too. It sits inside Ortent's wider guide to partner-led growth, which walks through the four archetypes at strategy level.

What is inside

• The twelve-marker diagnostic in full, with scoring bands and a component-variance rule
• The four archetypes: Referral, Co-Sell, ISV, Alliance. What each is, how it makes money, where it fails
• The three components of the operating layer that separate the archetypes: ownership, enablement, board narrative
• Three cross-industry worked examples: a life sciences platform, a fintech scale-up, a healthtech operator
• The before-and-after of a partner programme rebuilt from twelve partners to two
• How to use the diagnostic with a board, a CRO, and a partnerships lead in a single ninety-minute session

Who it is for

Chief Revenue Officers and Heads of Partnerships at growth-stage B2B SaaS businesses. Board chairs and NEDs of the same. Private equity operating partners who inherit a partner programme at close and need to know whether to rebuild it or double down on it. CEOs who suspect the partner narrative on the board deck is not the partner reality on the ground.

Written from an operating perspective

Four exits over three decades (Lotus to IBM, Paragon to Phone.com, Apertio to Nokia $240M, Clearswift to Lyceum) plus COO and CGO seats at Lumeon and Sapio Sciences, where the alliance and partner motion sat inside the operating remit. Every observation is drawn from partner programmes that shipped revenue or failed to.