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22 Channel Partner Analytics and Metrics to Track

When it comes to data, garbage in truly leads to garbage out. Unfortunately, partner and channel leaders often must make decisions about the performance of their partners, resellers, and distributors based on data that’s incomplete or siloed in separate systems. A strategic approach to analytics paired with today's software reporting and dashboard options can offer real-time insights into your indirect sales performance, driving higher ROI and a more engaged partner ecosystem. You’ll gain channel insights into customer behavior, channel partner performance, and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. 

Even better? The best channel partner analytics software can help you see into the future, providing forecasting and predictive capabilities based on your partners’ past performance. In this post, we’ll explore the world of channel partner analytics (and where it’s headed) and discuss the key channel partner metrics and best practices to increase ROI.  

👉 What you’ll find:  

How do you measure channel partners? 

With 75% of the world's commerce conducted through third-party sales, it's essential for businesses to effectively manage and optimize these partnerships. Whether you work with distributors, resellers, affiliates, or other partner types, channel partner management involves overseeing these relationships and continuously evaluating their performance.  

Channel partner analytics is the process of analyzing current data related to your partners, such as sales performance, revenue, and engagement. This data can be used to identify high-performing partners, detect areas for improvement, and optimize your partner relationships for maximum revenue growth.  

🔎 Discover more: As we’ll cover below, tracking key metrics is crucial to improving channel performance—here's how channel sales analytics can directly increase your ROI! 

With the right tool, you can also leverage this data to forecast future trends, make more informed decisions, better target your marketing efforts, and ultimately improve indirect sales performance over time. 

For example, Impartner’s Analytics Studio is one of the only tools that actually answers the two most important questions in the channel: which actions drive revenue and what makes a partner profitable? Whether you’re managing tens of thousands of partners or ten, Impartner Analytics offers actionable and crucial insights into your partner performance.  

🔎 Discover more: Find personalized dashboards, unlimited visuals, and in-depth reporting your business needs with Impartner Analytics.  

What are channel-specific metrics and KPIs?  

As you get started with channel partner analytics, it’s important to start tracking key channel metrics. While these won’t cover every metric or KPI that may be important for your business, they’re a start.  

Begin tracking these metrics early, analyze insights often, and identify trends to improve your channel partner program.  

Channel partner performance metrics  

For your resellers, distributors, affiliates, or other partners, get eyes on these channel partner metrics:  

  1. Contribution to overall revenue: Track the percentage of total channel revenue generated by each partner, highlighting their significance within your partner ecosystem 
  2. Average deal size: Measure the average revenue generated per sale by each partner to gauge their sales effectiveness  
  3. Deal registration rate: Track the number of deals registered by each partner (discover how Impartner Lead Management can automate your lead registration process)  
  4. Goal and quota attainment: Evaluate the extent to which partners achieve their sales targets, reach different performance tiers, and identify areas for improvement  
  5. MQL to SQL conversion rate: Track the percentage of MQLs (prospects that have shown interest in your offerings) that are successfully converted into SQLs (prospects that have been vetted and are more likely to make a purchase) for each partner. 
  6. Lead response time: Track the time taken by a partner to respond to new leads, which can point to their responsiveness and potential to close deals quickly  
  7. Partner-generated opportunities: Identify the number of sales opportunities created by each partner  
  8. Win rate: Calculate the ratio of deals won to the total number of opportunities pursued by each partner 
  9. Partner-specific Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Track this measurement of customer satisfaction specific to each of your partners, indicating the quality of their customer interactions, service, and other metrics  
  10. Engagement and participation: Track partner engagement with incentive programs, onboarding and certification courses, and contests to evaluate their effectiveness (learn how to improve channel partner engagement here)  
  11. Competitor affinity: Most partners work with multiple organizations, so assess the affinity of your partners towards your competitors, which can help in identifying future risks and opportunities 

Channel program performance metrics  

Looking at the health of your channel program as a whole? Start tracking these crucial channel program performance metrics:  

  1. Channel ROI: Track the proportion of your total revenue generated through partners to assess the overall impact of your channel sales strategy on your business  
  2. Lead conversion rate: Identify the percentage of leads that are converted into sales or partnerships, helping to evaluate the effectiveness of your partners 
  3. Product/solution breakdown: Analyze the sales performance of individual products or solutions, and identify trends and opportunities for growth 
  4. Partner segmentation breakdown: Measure the revenue and growth rate of partners across different product lines, partner sizes and tiers, and geographical locations to evaluate the success of your partner segmentation strategy  
  5. Velocity: Measure the speed at which deals progress through the sales pipeline, which can help you identify bottlenecks and improve sales processes  
  6. Partner recruitment and retention rates: Measure the rate at which new partners are added and assess your ability to retain partners, which can be an indicator of the overall health of your partner ecosystem 
  7. Churn rate: Likewise, this channel partner metric measures the rate at which partners discontinue their collaboration with your company over a specific period. Churn rate is crucial because it helps you understand partner dissatisfaction or other issues that are leading to disengagement. 
  8. Onboarding and training completion rates: Measure the percentage of partners who have completed your onboarding and training programs (learn how to create a personalized partner onboarding experience)  
  9. Time to revenue: Track the average time it takes for a new partner to start generating revenue, indicating the efficiency of your onboarding process  
  10. Partner satisfaction score: Survey partners' overall satisfaction with the program on an ongoing basis  
  11. Co-marketing ROI: Calculate your return on investment for co-marketing initiatives between the company and its channel partners (learn how to extend your reach with automated, seamless co-branded collateral

Best practices for channel partner analytics  

You’ve got the data from your partners and your program. Now what? Follow these best practices to ensure you take these analytics and make them actionable.  

Integrate your data sources 

Set up your partner analytics tools so they can access and integrate data into various sources, such as your CRM, to provide a comprehensive view of your performance.  

Make your data as seamless as possible, allowing everyone on the team to access data in a single view with no blind spots so you can make the best decisions for your business.  

🔎 Discover more: Seamless workflows, real-time data. Impartner empowers you to dig deeper into your data by integrating with tools like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and more.  

Regularly monitor key metrics 

As noted, track key channel performance metrics to gain insights into your program's effectiveness. Use a tool that automates reporting to make it easier. Then, at a minimum, aim for weekly check-ins with your team and monthly or quarterly debriefings for leadership.  

Leverage data visualization 

Utilize data visualization tools to make it easier to identify trends and patterns in your channel sales analytics, enabling you to make more informed decisions. 

Segment your channel partners 

Analyze your channel partners' performance and segment them based on their success, size, location, or other factors like type or performance tier. This can help you focus your efforts on supporting high-performing partners and identifying areas for improvement among underperforming partners. 

You can also create a tier-based system, with incentives for partners to reach the next tier of performance.  

Optimize your marketing strategies 

Today’s channel leaders know that their competitive edge is built on real-time, actionable data that shares one source of truth across teams.  

Use channel analytics to better target your marketing and co-marketing efforts, tailoring your campaigns to specific partners, markets, or customer segments. 

Talk data to me  

The best decisions start with data, and each day millions of partners in nearly every industry across the globe access Impartner. Why? Because the partner experience matters and leading channel organizations agree.  

Impartner is the fastest-growing, most award-winning partner management solution provider on the market. Our partner relationship management and through channel marketing automation solutions help companies accelerate revenue and profitability through their indirect sales channels at every partner lifecycle touchpoint. On average, organizations that use Impartner realize a 296% return on investment (ROI) according to a Forrester study. 

With Impartner Analytics Studio, you’ll find powerful data visualization and reporting tools, built-in automation, and seamless integration with leading CRM systems.  

Need to accelerate your partnerships? We’re ready when you are. 

About the Author

Impartner is the fastest-growing, most award-winning provider of partner management and partner marketing automation solutions. We've been around for decades, and were the first to coin the term "PRM". Today, over 40,000 users leverage Impartner to manage millions of partners within their ecosystem of distributors, resellers, and more. We draw on decades of experience with best practices in the channel to create content that helps partnership leaders grow their careers and scale their programs.

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