Partner swim lanes

One of the most important things you can do when launching a partner program (especially at SaaS PLG companies):

Having clear swim lanes.

This helps your company (the executive and GTM teams) and your partners understand how you can work together.

Here are examples of clear swim lanes:

1. Segmentation: Route to partners based on customer segments. For example: Partners cover 100% of the Commercial segment (<1000 employees), while the SaaS company takes on Enterprise segments (>1000 employees)

2. 100% reseller GTM: The SaaS company only sells through resellers. As you distribute leads to partners, you create a long term flywheel effect. In some cases, this is not possible to implement due to the self serve nature of PLG, and often times a "customer driven" approach to reselling is more common.

3. Regions: Partner led by region (for ex: country). Partner can help with the local presence, language, currency exchange risk and contract terms.

4. Capabilities: Every customer requirement that falls into a pre-defined "capability" goes to a partner.

5. Verticals: Partner led by vertical where they have much stronger domain expertise.

I put together this slide with Partnership Leaders to help you ideate on possible swim lanes. Hope it helps!