This month I am featuring the leading affiliate networks and tracking platforms of 2020. In this week’s post, and as a continuation of my series from Part 1 (LinkConnector) and 2 (Impact), comes B2B leading affiliate network, PartnerStack!

A Brief History of PartnerStack

PartnerStack was founded in 2015 by four founders: Bryn Jones, Jonathan Mendes, Luke Swanek, Neil Chudleigh. They started with a simple, silly-sounding idea: “how could we make a machine that prints money for businesses?”

That silly idea led to an actual insight: the fastest-growing SaaS companies had already figured out how to rapidly scale revenue without escalating their costs at the same time. They were recruiting a whole world of affiliates, referrers and resellers to sell their product for them, and reaching all-new markets in the process.

They were growing their businesses with partnerships.

Partnerships, of course, don’t literally print money. But a well-managed partner program can drive acquisition and revenue with much higher return-on-investment than any other channel.

With this insight in mind, the founding team was accepted into Y Combinator and began building PartnerStack. Since then, PartnerStack has grown from a team of 4 to nearly 100 employees, working with hundreds of companies like Intercom, Asana and Intuit to manage and scale their partner programs, and onboarded thousands of partners to the PartnerStack platform.

Key Features and Capabilities

Manage multiple partner channels

Whether you’re looking to close more deals, generate more leads or bring traffic to your next campaign, PartnerStack is built to handle every kind of partnership — and all of them at once.

• Track partner links, leads, and deals inside PartnerStack
• Manage and engage your partners with triggers and automated systems
• Embed customer loyalty programs directly into your product

Maximize partner performance

Programs that prioritize engagement generate more revenue. PartnerStack helps you create custom experiences for each of your partner channels, nurturing new partners into top-performers.

• Create partner groups with unique reward structures and content
• Automate partner onboarding with custom forms and email flows
• Host partner marketing assets inside your partner’s dashboards

Automate partner payments

One of the most common reasons companies move their program to PartnerStack: they’re tired of wasting time making sure partners get paid every month. PartnerStack pays partners for you.

• Receive a single monthly invoice, paid by credit card or ACH
• Partners withdraw their own rewards through Stripe or PayPal
• Comply with global regulations and give your finance team visibility

Find the right partners

Thousands of agencies, resellers and marketers already use PartnerStack to generate recurring revenue for themselves, and for businesses like yours. PartnerStack connects you to all of them.

• Immediate access to thousands of partners to launch your program with
• Acquire partners who already successfully sell to your target audience
• Position your product alongside other top-tier SaaS offerings

Advantages and Benefits

The biggest difference between PartnerStack and other PRM platforms is that PartnerStack is designed to provide a great experience not just to the companies running programs on the platform, but to the partners that join those programs.

When a program gives partners the tools they need to succeed, they focus their energy on those programs and stay engaged for longer — meaning more recurring revenue for everybody. That’s why PartnerStack prioritizes giving a great experience to every kind of partner.

• PartnerStack is built to manage every type of partner relationship — from affiliates to referrers, resellers and more. Many platforms focus on a specific type of partner, like affiliate management, at the expense of including any others. When you want to scale beyond that original channel, you could be forced to find a new platform to do it. PartnerStack supports link attribution, lead referral and deal submissions right inside the partner dashboard, so you’ll never need to look for other software as you scale.

• PartnerStack is designed to help you communicate with partners, and help them sell more. The most successful partner programs use automated onboarding and make resources easily available to partners, helping them understand how to effectively promote each product. Yet many PRMs expect you to use other platforms to communicate with your partners. PartnerStack makes it easy to build custom email flows and unique resource libraries for every type of partner.

• Partners get their own dedicated partner dashboard built for their needs. PartnerStack is a two-sided platform with dedicated dashboards for both program managers and their partners. Partners can message program managers, generate custom links, refer leads and deals, access educational resources, take on challenges with special incentives, withdraw their rewards and more.

B2B Industry and Category Focus

PartnerStack is the only partner network that can support B2B SaaS offerings and has the integrations required to support B2B customer lifecycle (i.e. free trials, non-instantaneous sales processes).

PartnerStack works with some of the largest and fastest growing SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies in the world. We support customers like Evernote, Unbounce, Monday.com, Asana, Intercom, Bill.com, and Intuit in launching, managing and scaling their partner programs.

While indirect marketing and sales isn’t a new approach, there’s been an explosion of interest in partnerships from SaaS companies looking for low-risk ways to quickly scale up acquisition and revenue. But why do partnership channels work so well with SaaS?

Unlike physical goods and on-premise software, SaaS products can be distributed and sold at high volume without incurring higher costs. What costs SaaS companies money isn’t getting the product to customers, but getting customers to discover and care about the product.

Smart SaaS companies started figuring out that by incentivizing partners outside their companies to promote and sell their products, they could reach many more kinds of customers than they could with direct marketing and sales alone. And because partners only get paid when they successfully drive business and the costs involved are so low, a well managed partner program quickly pays for itself.

The partners promoting those SaaS companies also realized something: businesses buy software in bundles. A business looking to launch a new marketing campaign might require multiple new tools working together, such as Unbounce (landing pages and conversion optimization) and Workato (marketing automation) to get the results they want. Partners that can position and sell multiple products together end up generating more revenue for themselves and all of the companies they work with.

Despite the proven success of partnerships in selling technology, the technology and tools companies use to actually manage those partnerships haven’t kept up with what program managers and partners need.

PartnerStack is the first PRM designed for the realities of modern partnerships, allowing companies to manage multiple programs and partner groups, and for partners to join programs across multiple companies in the PartnerStack platform.

Publisher Relationships

PartnerStack works with both B2C and B2B software publishers, helping companies establish strategic affiliate relationships with relevant publishers in the PartnerStack network.

The PartnerStack network has over 500,000 partners, and is growing at 120% year over year. These partners include agencies, consulting firms, individual consultants, and large publishers. The Blueprint by Motley Fool, WordPress, Banks and Financial Institution partners and www.sitebuilderreport.com.

Within their network, you can expect to find affiliate partners that operate:

• Software recommendation sites
• Industry content hubs
• News and media sites
• Partners with large email databases/regular newsletters/social media following

PartnerStack has a dedicated partner experience team that works with the largest partners on their network, identifying opportunities to partner with their customers.

Attribution Capabilities

PartnerStack’s tracking and attribution gives affiliates full funnel insight into how they are performing, including real-time visibility into their earnings, all with industry leading CRM and billing system integrations.

Specifically, this means that:

• Affiliates are able to create custom links as well as leverage pre-created links by the company they are working with.
• Tracking is in real time since they connect to their billing system. This means affiliates have continual access to how they are performing.
• Affiliates have the ability to see how much they have earned, and can cash out their earnings right from within their dashboard.
• Since PartnerStack integrates with the end client’s CRM, affiliates will be able to see the current stages their referred business is in as they move through the vendors sales pipeline.

PartnerStack is enhancing their attribution capabilities even further, with exciting announcements to come in late Q4 2020.

Free PartnerStack Resources

• G2 Partner Management, Fall 2020 Report
• 5 Questions to Ask When Launching Your Partner Program
• How 19 SaaS Companies Got Their First 100 Partners 

Book a demo with PartnerStack today!