Playbook

How to evaluate a vendor partner programme for a consultancy

A partner badge is a marketing asset with a cost measured in billable days. The four numbers that say whether a partnership is real.

The methodThe partner ladder test: a gate, four numbers, a price

This playbook is a method for evaluating a vendor partner programme for a consultancy: pricing the next rung of the ladder in billable days, applying a gate before anything is signed, and scoring an existing partnership on four numbers. It is for founders and commercial leads in services businesses who hold a partner badge from a cloud or software vendor, or are being invited to chase one, and who have never costed what the badge consumes. A partner badge is a marketing asset, and its price is paid in utilisation (utilization): the days your best people spend on certifications, enablement and partner reporting instead of on client work.

Partner programmes are sold as opportunity. The deck shows co-selling, referrals, marketplace listings and a logo on the vendor's site. What it does not show is the cost side, because the vendor does not carry it. Every rung asks for more certified people, more case studies, more revenue through the vendor's channel and more of your time in the vendor's meetings. Each of those is a billable day not billed. Because the cost never arrives as an invoice, it never arrives in the decision, and a consultancy can climb for years on the assumption that the next tier is where it pays off.

The gate comes first. Before a partnership is signed or a rung is chased, three things must all be present: leverage, meaning the partner brings you something you could not get alone; scalability, meaning the work it generates can grow without your cost growing in step; and incremental revenue, meaning work you would not otherwise have won. The written rule was that without all three, we do not proceed. Then the four numbers, for a partnership you already hold: revenue that came through the partner and would not have come otherwise; the billable days consumed by the programme's requirements; the pipeline the partner has actually put in front of you rather than promised; and the cost of standing still, which is what you lose if the badge lapses.

From those four inputs the playbook prices the next rung as an investment case in the currency it actually costs you, billable days at your own rate card, and sets that against what the rung can reasonably return. The result is one of three decisions, climb, hold or stop, with the arithmetic written down so that it can be revisited a year later against what actually happened rather than against the deck.

What is deliberately not in it: a comparison of specific vendor programmes, their tier names or their current requirements, because those change every year and the vendors publish them. There is nothing about rebates, funding or the commercial terms of any agreement I signed. The playbook is the gate and the arithmetic, and it works for any ladder.

I learned it by climbing. The business that became DevOpsGroup held partner status with Rackspace early on, and later with Microsoft and with AWS, and each ladder was worth climbing for a while. The gate of leverage, scalability and incremental revenue was written down as the standard form for deciding whether to enter a partnership at all. The playbook is honest about what happened next: it was used exactly once. Every subsequent partnership decision was made on the deck and on enthusiasm, and a gate applied once is a gate you did not have. The four numbers came afterwards, when we sat down and counted the days a single rung had cost us and set them against what had actually come through the channel. Some partnerships passed that test comfortably. Not all of them would have passed the gate, had we run it.

The playbook is in development. Joining the waitlist means you hear when it is ready, and it lets me ask which partner ladder you are standing on and what you would want the scorecard to settle. Nothing is for sale yet.

What you will get

Who it is for