Why are Partners integral for business growth in 2026?
Did you know that leads sourced from partners cost approximately 5x less than via paid search and organic/SEO?
There are a lot of articles on partnerships, how to form partnerships, how to source and scale partners. But I often find that those articles don’t scratch an itch on how. There is always information on why and short bullet points on how - e.g. report thoroughly, commit to your partner, less is more. But what does that actually mean?
After working with hundreds of founders over the past decade, I’ve amalgamating lots of data and information to bring a series of blogs to Partnered Works, written by me with some guest appearances, to dive deeper into the how. So that you as the reader, maybe a founder, maybe a Partnerships person, can take away some tangible knowledge.
The best place for us to start is on why partners are integral for business growth. I’m going to speak on the three main categories for partner channels - referrers, affiliates and strategic partners.
Wherever you need your business to go, partners are already there.
There are 38,435 medium-sized businesses in the UK, with approximately 8,000-12,000 of those being B2B tech and SaaS businesses with 50-249 employees.
There are 630,000 medium-sized businesses in the US, around 17x more than the UK, with approximately 95,000–130,000 of those being B2B tech and SaaS businesses with 50–249 employees.
That's an average of around 110,000 businesses across the US and UK alone that have already invested time and resource into growing their network of customers and brand awareness.
Imagine tapping into 1% of those potential partners. What would that do for your business?
Referral Partners
As a founder, you’ll know that acquiring new customers is the most important moving part for your companies’ longevity. It’s hard, it can be expensive, there are so many data points to track and optimise. If you post an ad, how many people click vs convert? How many of those converted clients then stick around? This is the number one pain point for any scaling business.
Now imagine you partnered with a company with 10,000 customers. You worked with that partner to ensure they believe in your product or service, they have all the marketing materials they need, they feel motivated by a great commission structure, they want to put you in front of their audience because you solve a common pain point for their customer. They trust you, so their customers will begin sharing that trust. Earning trust is incredibly hard through ads alone.
That email goes live. You just got 1,000 clicks onto your website, and 100 conversions. (I’m using 1%’s as the complete minimum I’ve ever seen for a campaign).
You now only have to pay your partner for those conversions. Not for the campaign or for the leads.
You’ve just taken your CAC from £900 to £200.
Your partner is happy, your new customers are happy, and you have 9,900 leads that have now seen your solution and may come back to you when they are ready to (just make sure your partner has a tracked link or promo code so they get as much attribution as possible - we reward in partnerships).
This example is one partner. Imagine having 10-50 partners.
Affiliate Partners
Affiliates and affiliate programmes can be a full time job to manage - if they’re not set up correctly. So if you’ve have a bad experience running, owning or participating in an affiliate programme, let’s start afresh.
When I recommend a business to have an affiliate programme, I’m doing so because it can be one of the most scaleable, cheap and easy channels to new customers.
You already have customers, all you need if for them to recommend you. If you have a good product, they’ll want to anyway. So my recommendation is to start seeing this as a genuine growth channel and invest in it - time and resource. Get it set up properly and manage it efficiently. I’ll do a separate post on affiliates as it deserves one.
If your customer that you paid £900 for via paid ads recommends your service to someone that converts - you just halved your CAC. What if that person then went on to recommend you? And so on…
Your customers are doing the selling for you. Treat them well, pay them in a way that they resonate with, and they will continue to recommend you.
There are people out there who have large followings on different platforms, if they recommend you - it’s not just to one person, it could be to tens of thousands.
My advice here is:
Invest well in a management platform. You want affiliates to be able to sign up, automatically generate their tracked link, and be able to track their pipelines, progress and success. This is integral to your sales teams, so it should be integral to your affiliates. Plus, your Partner Manager cannot sit and manually send out monthly reports, or anything manual in fact. Not when it can be 90% managed using a software - and therefore infinately scaleable.
Pay your affiliates in a way they resonate with. If you offer a £50 Amazon voucher per conversion, do people rush to sign up and send you leads? What about a year free of your product if they hit 10 conversions in a year? What about if you offer £50 cash, or £200 cash? What if you held annual dinners for your top affiliates? Find out what works and create structure around that.
Make it easy for people to know you have an affiliate programme, sign up and sell your solution. Make a partner page, add a ‘sign up’ CTA and ensure you have amazing marketing materials they can easily download - good management softwares have areas for these to be stored.
Lastly - pay your affiliates. A large portion of your affiliates will be your customer, your future customer and people who are representing your solution. Pay them on time. Again, a management software will make this easy.
Strategic Partners
I label strategic partners those partners that allow you to achieve something you wouldn’t be able to do as easily on your own.
What makes a partner strategic is the intent behind the relationship. Co-marketing campaigns, referral agreements, and product integrations can all be tactics (motions) within a partnership, but they aren't the strategy itself.
A genuine strategic partnership starts with alignment: shared audience, shared goals, and a clear understanding of what success looks like for both sides.
An example of this would be a website builder partnering with a payment solution, like Stripe. In order for the website builder to integrate a payment process, they’d have to build this themselves which is a huge task and entirely new arm of their business. They aren’t a payment solution, they are a website builder platform and that’s what they’re good at. So, in order to fill this very integral gap, they use a well known payment solution. The. choice of who to partner with is crucial because it reflects 100% on the website builder. If the customer can’t receive their money from their customers, if there’s no support, if something goes wrong and there’s not a very good team available to solve that problem, that would very quickly become the website builders problem.
So, the purpose of a strategic partner is to enable you to provide a full solution to your customer, even if you’re not the expert across all areas - your partners are.
What’s in it for the partner? Usually customers, revenue, distribution.
End Notes
As you’ve now learned, partners are no longer “nice to have” additions to your company. They are integral to your business success. They can be, and are to many enterprise companies, the core engine for go-to-market strategies and scaling success.
McKinsey forecasts that by 2030, parter ecosystems will play a major role in almost every aspect of the global economy, driving around $80 trillion in annual revenue - a third of total global revenue.
For scaling businesses, the question is no longer whether partnerships matter. It's whether you're set up to make them work. Which is exactly the solution we offer at Partnered Works. If you’d like to speak with me, please book a complimentary 30 minute consultation call using the button below.
