Where to Find New B2B SaaS Partners in 2026

2025 has been one rough year. Mass layoffs in virtually every industry. AI forcing product changes left and right. GTM approaches getting torn down and rebuilt.

But when markets get shaky, partnerships stay steady. They’re one of the few ways to grow without leaning on cold outbound or expensive acquisition.

They support customer retention, influence renewal decisions, and unlock upsell and cross-sell opportunities that sales teams wouldn’t necessarily find or close on their own. The trick is finding (and nurturing) the partners that can guide you through the turbulence.

Before the year comes to a close, we decided to round up nine strategies for finding partners that can help you ride the wave.

9 Ways to Find New Partners in 2026

1. Strengthen Your Current Partnerships

Before you reach out to any new partners, make sure you’ve maximized the value of the partners you already have. Tapping into that network can lead to hotter leads far faster than building new relationships from scratch.

So, take a minute to review your partner enablement and engagement strategies:

• Do they know what’s expected of them and how to move up in tier?
• Can they easily access pricing sheets, training, and marketing materials?
• Have they been consistently bringing in new referrals and registering deals?
• Are your incentives actually good?
• Are they logging into your portal?

If the answer is no, invest some time into turning that into a yes. If you’re not sure, ask your partners — and not just the ones you know and love.

In fact, you may even want to ask partners who didn’t join your roster this year to hop on a quick call. You may come away with other ideas to improve your program and, ultimately, your partner-sourced revenue.

For example, maybe:

• You’re missing compliance requirements. SOC 2 and similar certifications are deal-breakers for enterprise partners. Bring that feedback to your CISO to see if you can help move that process along.
• They didn’t see a clear path to joint revenue. Consider revising your messaging and positioning with your partner marketing team.
• They worried about the lift on their team. Simplify onboarding steps, create new documentation, or design a lighter-weight co-selling path.

2. Revisit Your Ideal Partner Profile

Your ideal partner profile (IPP) from last year might be drastically different from the one you use in 2026. Markets evolve, ecosystems shift, and AI has forced almost every vendor into new categories.

A refined IPP will help you:

• Improve partner portal engagement
• Generate more sales-qualified leads
• Increase brand presence through co-marketing
• Strengthen alignment across sales, marketing, and partnerships

As Stacy Desrosiers at Lewis Rhodes Labs told us, “You need to understand who your partners are, why they’re participating in your program, and if you’re incentivizing them enough. Without that baseline information, you can’t possibly support your channel in the way they expected you to, whether the economy is in a recession or not.”

Need help formalizing your IPP? Here’s a step-by-step guide. 

3. Review New Integration Requests

Most requests for new integrations flow directly to product, but they should also flow to partnerships. If multiple customers are asking for the same integration, that vendor should be on your radar.

Before you set up a call with them, do a little due diligence yourself.

Talk to industry peers you trust who may have worked with that company in the past, and definitely talk to customers who’ve had the platform as part of their tech stack for at least a year. Ideally, you’d talk to the business analyst, the person in IT, and the department owner of the tool to get a clear view of:

1. Whether the tool is sticky
2. Whether the company supports integrations well
3. Whether customers would be excited about a partnership between the two platforms

If a potential partner hits all three, they’re likely worth pursuing.

4. Find New Partners By Talking to Your Customers

Customers are basically a free funnel of market information. They’re paying close attention to up-and-coming tools in their industry through channels you may not even know about.

In a conversation on r/SaaS about B2B lead gen, Redditor stuartlogan points out: “The most reliable lead gen actually comes from your existing customer base – most completely overlook asking for referrals, but it converts at like 10x higher rates than cold outreach.”

That goes for partner referrals, too. If you can, request a slight modification to your customer success team’s monthly surveys or NPS to add one question:

What tools or agencies have been most helpful to you this quarter?

You might even consider monetizing it. For every partner referral that joins your program, customers can receive a monthly discount, a gift card, or another incentive that aligns with your brand.

If you notice more than one enterprise customer is using a specific tool or consulting firm, chances are, they should be on your partner roster. And you already have a warm intro: your mutual customer. Do some quality enablement, create a joint case study, and boom, you’ve got yourself a successful partnership.

5. Plug Your IPP Into Clay

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Clay. Most people assume Clay’s just for sales and marketing, but it can actually be a huge boon for partnerships. Liz Melton, a freelance writer and consultant for B2B SaaS companies, wrote about how Clay might be used for partnerships for Zapier:

“I used to work in partnerships, so I instantly thought to use Clay as a way to build a list of companies that fit an ideal partner profile. All you have to do is plug in all of the specific attributes, and you’ll have a whole list to work from.”

It can even work for finding B2B influencers: “You can filter based on keywords, followers, and engagement rate (and more filters), and pull in their contact information right away.”

Once you’ve built a list of potential partners, Clay’s native outreach features make it easy to build a template and send intro emails — straight from the platform.

Or, you could use Clay’s AI agent, Claygent, to limit your list to contacts who are a first or second connection to current customers, partners, advisors, or investors who can facilitate an intro for you.

6. Scour Reddit to Find New Partners

Reddit is where people go to share their real opinions, and it’s a great place to find potential partners — in conversations about your industry, your product, your competitors, your partners.

That being said, it’s hard to monitor those conversations yourself. Look for tools like Relato that can do the work for you.

With Relato, all you have to do is write a prompt. The agent will scan Reddit for posts, replies, and mentions, analyze their sentiment, assess opportunities, and send you a report via email.

7. Get Inspo From Other Industries

There’s plenty of inspiration for unexpected (yet effective) partnerships in B2C. Take a close look at your favorite food brands, retailers, or subscription services. Who are they partnered with?

How do you think they made the case for it? Is there something similar you can do in your industry?

If you’re extra curious, find their head of partnerships on LinkedIn and ask if you can buy them a virtual coffee. If you’re not comfortable with that, scan your network and see if any friends in gaming, healthcare, fintech, or CPG might be willing to chat. Talking shop with someone in a totally different space can be a catalyst for creativity.

8. Join Partner Communities

This builds on #5 — it’s really hard to think about partnerships in new ways if you’re constantly talking to the same people. So, get out there and meet some more!

You never know, that person you strike up a conversation with at happy hour might just be your “in” with a whale of a partner you’ve been trying to get access to for a while. Small talk with someone from a completely different vertical might clue you into a place to look for partners you hadn’t considered before.

If you’re not sure where to start, join Partnership Leaders.

It’s a 2,100+ member community that hosts roughly 400 events a year in all different cities across the globe. Its annual conference, Catalyst, is one of the best places to connect with and learn from your peers.

9. Show Up in the Right Media Channels to Find New Partners

Partner recruitment isn’t just an outbound play. The more visible your brand is, the more likely partners are to reach out on their own.

To drive that interest, you need to show up where potential partners already spend time. Think popular newsletters, industry podcasts, influencer Substacks. Just be thoughtful about your pitch. Redditor erickrealz warns:

“Expect limited interest without proven performance metrics. YouTube creators and newsletter writers in your niche will be more receptive to partnerships if you can show genuine value for their audiences. Most experienced affiliates want to see conversion data and customer testimonials before promoting new tools.”

A good place to start is by publishing executive thought leadership on LinkedIn or in Slack communities. Being genuinely useful (i.e., sharing real tactics, real case studies, real frameworks) helps your product gain credibility with the right audiences.

Set Yourself Up For a Banner 2026

According to research from Partnership Leaders, a substantial percentage of organizations derive between 30-60% of their revenue from partnerships, and those that do have higher close rates and larger deal sizes — even when times are tough. So, if you can build a solid partner program now, you’ll be in great shape for what’s to come: AI bubble or not.

But as your ecosystem grows, you’ll need a reliable way to manage it. Channeltivity is the PRM for enterprise partner teams, centralizing everything from partner education to partner marketing to partner performance tracking. And it syncs directly with your CRM, whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, or Microsoft Dynamics.

Book a demo to see how Channeltivity can help you scale your partner program in 2026 (and beyond).