Partner Scorecard

What a scorecard is for

Partner relationships drift. Without an agreed set of measures, quarterly reviews become anecdote exchanges and underperformance goes unnamed for a year. A scorecard fixes the criteria in advance so that a difficult conversation about a partner not delivering is a discussion about numbers rather than about personalities.

It also works in the partner's favour: it makes clear what the vendor is actually rewarding, which is often different from what the partner assumed.

What to include

Revenue and pipeline are the obvious measures, but on their own they lag too far behind to be useful for managing. Add leading indicators: registered deals, trained or certified staff, marketing activities completed, and joint customer retention or satisfaction. Retention deserves particular weight, because a partner that sells well but implements badly costs more than it earns.

Keep the list short. A scorecard with fifteen measures gets ignored by everyone including the person who built it.

Scoring affiliates

Affiliate programs need a simpler version, and the measures are different. Clicks, conversion rate, EPC and the retention quality of referred customers tell you most of what matters. Referred-customer churn is the measure programs most often skip and most often should not: an affiliate sending large volumes of customers who cancel within two months is producing negative value, and raw referral counts will hide that completely.

Using it without damaging the relationship

Share the scorecard with the partner rather than scoring them in private, and agree the measures before the period starts, not after. A scorecard produced retrospectively to justify a decision already taken is transparent to everyone and destroys trust faster than having no measurement at all.