Partner Operations: What Is It, and Is It Still Relevant in B2B?

In a relationship-driven team like partnerships, the focus is primarily on people: prospects, customers, and partners — as it should be. But when everyone’s account mapping, coselling, working the conference circuit, and pulling together last-minute decks, who’s running everything in the background? Partner operations teams.

They’re the ones streamlining handoffs, building enablement paths, monitoring SLAs, and implementing the tooling that makes relationships scale. And they’re still a very much needed resource, even with all the AI tools out there.

Yes, AI can surface anomalies, automate some of the more tedious processes going on behind the scenes, and help draft QBR slides. But it can’t:

• Align incentives across two companies
• Fix a mismatched revenue-share model
• Rebuild trust after a missed SLA
• Prioritize trade-offs when everything feels urgent

Below, we talk more about how crucial this role is, how AI changes the work (and how it doesn’t), and what to look for in your first partner operations hire.

What’s Partner Operations?

Partner operations is the person or team in charge of the entire back office of your program — they keep everything running smoothly, for your team, tangential teams (sales, marketing, finance, product), and partners.

As Raegan Wilson, who consults top partner teams at Spur Reply, puts it:

“If I had to sum it up, a partner operations manager or team puts a structure around your program and holds people accountable to it. They’ve got i’s dotted and t’s crossed on every business process that touches partnerships and make improvements to those processes over time, and work cross-functionally to make sure things are running smoothly.”

What Partner Operations Handles

Often, they take care of PRM implementation and maintenance, which comes with a whole host of duties:

• Getting alignment from the partner team on how they want onboarding and enablement workflows to work, building those flows out, then testing them.
• Integrating the PRM with the company’s CRM and working with the admin to make sure channel account managers and partners are seeing what they’re supposed to see.
• Uploading content to the resource library or co-branded collateral modules, which requires close collaboration with marketing (or partner marketing).
• Streamlining partner onboarding and explaining program rules to new partners. This could involve live webinars, a video in the portal, office hours, and/or excellent documentation.
• Ensuring contracts are signed and each partner has a business plan so partners start off on the right foot and the business stays compliant.
• Continuously checking on partner health via reports and dashboards. If each partner manager has a large number of partners to manage, partner operations may notify them of partners who are slipping or move partners into new tiers as soon as they meet the necessary requirements.
• Manage the referral and deal pipeline. If a lead or opportunity has been sitting in a status for too long or hasn’t had much activity, they flag it and help get the right people to nudge it along. They also forecast partner revenue on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• Ensuring partners receive payment for qualified referrals, closed deals, or MDF.
• Identifying and offboarding partners who aren’t meeting expectations.

Though most of their work involves managing the nuts and bolts of a partner program, partner operations also play a valuable role in something else: partner strategy.

A fantastic partner operations specialist not only observes everything that’s currently happening in the program, but zooms out to see where it’s headed in the next year or two — and whether that direction aligns with their company’s overall goals.

They bring fresh ideas to leadership about how things could be done differently or what they could try in the next month or quarter (and try to back it up with as much data as possible).

Do You Need a Partner Operations Team?

If you’ve got a small team or you’re thinking about launching a partner program, it’s easy to think you might not need a whole FTE dedicated to partner ops. But that would be a mistake.

“The truth,” Raegan says, “is that you always need to have someone thinking about this. You can’t execute well without partner ops. And if you can’t afford to hire a new person, you need someone on the team to very intentionally carve time out of their day to work on it.”

But that’s the hard part.

Partner managers are fully focused on recruiting new partners, nurturing relationships, and getting deals over the finish line. They don’t have time to pull reports, look for signs of partner churn, keep bad actors from joining the program, or monitor payouts — let alone consider where the ecosystem is headed and how to be a key player. Trying to spread those duties across one or two people’s already full plates is a recipe for disaster.

“I’d go so far as to say a program without partner ops is a partner program in name only,” Raegan emphasizes.

It might feel uncomfortable to invest in partner operations now, but you don’t want to get to the point where you need to inject structure into chaos. It’ll take a long time to get to the place you want, and it’ll be a really tough job for whoever you’re bringing on.

5 Qualities of a Top-Notch Partner Ops Specialist

If you can make the case for a partner ops manager or team, it’s worth it. Here’s the catch — your leadership wants to see proof of their value. People who tend to succeed quickly:

1. Are systems thinkers

These people see the partner motion as a connected system: people process, data, and tools.

To that end, they know their way around a CRM, PRM, and account mapping tool. They’ve worked closely with system admins and may even make their own changes to settings, fields, workflows, and permissions on the fly so that everything is working smoothly.

If it’s not, they not only fix the problem (and any downstream impacts) as quickly as they can, but rebuild the process to prevent issues from cropping up again. Then, they document the change and train internal teams and partners on the new process.

For instance, Phil Portman at Textdrip, picked a partner operations person based on the fact that they had experience using CRM tools to track multi-touch partner engagement. “To me, that showed they understood processes, scale, and how to align multiple departments behind a single initiative. That mix of curiosity and tech comfort made a big difference.”

Someone who can take vague instructions and turn them into a repeatable process is an excellent candidate for partner ops.

2. Are numbers-driven

If partner ops folks are process first, they’re data second. And, if they’re doing it right, the data they collect and analyze informs better process.

Hiren Shah at Anstrex reveals, “When we were hiring, we looked for someone with an analytical skillset. They had to be able to take a mountain of spreadsheets and turn it into a partner engine. Bonus points if they had an obsessive inclination to process map.”

People who come from other numbers-heavy backgrounds — think analysts, deal desk, project managers — tend to do well in this role. They’ve had to build and present charts and graphs to all levels of the business, so they know what every audience is looking for and how to communicate it:

• For partners: clear deal reg, referral, lead, and training & certification dashboards
• For partner managers: high level view of partner performance and activity, flagging partners who are struggling
• For leadership: time to revenue, partner deal close rate (and cycle time), partner churn rate

3. Aren’t afraid to push back

Partnership operations is not for the weak. When you’re in charge of the data that impacts peoples’ paychecks, you’re in for some tough conversations. The best partner ops managers are confident in their data and their processes because they know them inside and out.

That makes them well-poised to:

• Manage internal politics. It’s much easier if you have the receipts in front of you.
• Hold the line on definitions (sourced vs. influenced deals, partner of record) so comp and partner credit stays clean.
• Ask “Why do we do it this way?” and get buy-in for a newly designed process.
• Push back on vanity metrics and replace them with KPIs tied directly to partner activity.
• Require proof-of-performance for MDF and claw back when it isn’t met.

It’s hard to tell if someone has this skill in an interview. Situational questions like, “Tell me about a time you said no,” can help you figure out if they have what it takes. Clear, specific answers are a strong signal.

4. Are cross-functional by default

These people understand how all the moving parts of the business work together and the role that partnership plays in the company. They know who is responsible for what and who to talk to to get things done. They also know how to play the game — and get the partner team the respect and insights they deserve.

As Raegan points out, “In most orgs, channel is not the only route to market. Partner operations should be looking for ways to get and give information to other teams.”

This skill doesn’t have to come from a channel background. David Hunt at Versys Media hired a partner ops specialist because of her track record of taming growth-stage chaos.

He explains, “What stood out about her was her experience solving operational problems combined with legit interpersonal tact. She could not only build out structured workflows, but also manage the complexity of different personalities across geos and verticals. That combination of operational discipline and high EQ was key.”

For Orest Chaykivskyy at Forbytes, an ideal partner ops specialist had a consulting background. “Our best hire came from consulting, not tech. She’s exceptional at building trust across stakeholders and keeping everyone moving in the same direction without needing constant escalation.”

How is Partner Ops Changing With AI

AI has made life for partner operations teams a whole lot easier. Now there are tools that can automatically:

• Surface underperforming partners based on specific engagement data (portal logins, training completion, deal reg velocity)
• Ping partner managers about a partner’s missed goals or deteriorating performance
• Spot overlapping registrations and suggest next steps to avoid channel conflict
• Offer more personalized onboarding and learning paths via chatbots
• Run A/B tests on co-branded landing pages

But, as Phil puts it so eloquently, “AI helps with the ‘what happened’ but not always the ‘what now’ and ‘how do we fix it.’ That’s still very much a human task.”

The partner operations teams that continue to do well in this environment will learn when and how to use AI to their advantage — and when to use their other soft skills instead. Raegan advises, “If you have access to a tool, try to optimize your daily tasks one by one, starting with the most monotonous ones. I’m looking forward to a time where AI can do things for partners, but that really depends a lot on your PRM data quality.”

Yes, Partner Ops is Still Relevant, But They Need Data to Do Their Jobs

Top-tier partner operations teams run on clean, connected data. And without a strong foundation to work from, they’re going to be nose deep in spreadsheets.

An enterprise-ready PRM ensures consistent, reliable data. Per Raegan, “You can blow a lot of things apart later by creating bad data from the start. Data governance is huge, so look for a PRM with some of it already baked in.”

Channeltivity, for example:

• Unifies training, channel marketing, and channel sales data, making it easy to pull and assess partner activity. It also allows you to enforce required fields and save specific views for quicker and more accurate reporting.
• Has partner-facing dashboards and email notifications so partners (and their partner managers) know exactly where they stand — whether an agreement needs to be signed or a deal registration is about to expire.
• Has native integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot for two-way sync of partners, leads, referrals, and opportunities, so channel account managers and AEs are always working from the same truth.

When partner ops teams have reliable data, they can do the work that AI can’t — pinpointing what to automate, foreseeing (and eliminating) friction, and anticipating where the program should go in the future.

Want to see how Channeltivity can equip your partner operations team to deliver the best partner experience?

Schedule a demo today.