The partner program glossary

Partner relationship management (PRM) is the practice and the software category for running a company's indirect sales channel: recruiting partners, giving them somewhere to work, registering the deals they bring, and paying them what they earned.

Channel sales is selling through other companies rather than only through your own reps: resellers, referral partners, agencies, systems integrators and technology partners who put your product in front of buyers you would not otherwise reach.

Account mapping is comparing your customer and prospect list against a partner's to find the accounts you both have a relationship with, so the two teams can work the overlap together instead of guessing where it is.

Whitespace analysis is finding the gap between what an account could buy and what it currently does: the products it does not own, the divisions it has not rolled out to, or the partner-held accounts you have never sold to at all.

Co-selling is a vendor and a partner working the same opportunity together, each contributing what they have: the partner brings the relationship and the account context, the vendor brings the product expertise and usually the commercial terms.

Deal registration is a partner telling the vendor about an opportunity before working it, and the vendor confirming that the partner is the one who gets credit and commission if it closes.

Partner attribution is recording which partner contributed to a deal and how much, so partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue can be reported alongside everything else rather than estimated at the end of the quarter.

Partner tiering is grouping partners into levels, commonly something like silver, gold and platinum, where each level carries a different commission rate, a different set of benefits, and a threshold a partner has to meet to hold it.

Market development funds (MDF) are budgets a vendor gives partners to spend on marketing activity that generates demand for the vendor's product, claimed against evidence and usually approved before the money is committed.

A SPIF is a short-term bonus paid on top of normal commission to push a specific behaviour: selling a particular product, closing before a date, or attaching a service to a deal.

Partner onboarding is everything between a partner signing an agreement and that partner producing their first deal: getting them access, teaching them enough to sell, and making the first registration easy enough that it actually happens.

A partner portal is the site a company's partners log into to find collateral, register deals, track their own pipeline and commission, and get support, scoped so each partner sees only their own information.