Partner Marketing Strategy: 34 Tactics to Generate Massive Partner Leads

Partner marketing, also called co-marketing or partnership marketing, is when two companies that sell to the same customers without competing promote each other or market together, so each reaches the other’s audience. The common forms are co-hosted webinars and events, joint content, integrations and app marketplace listings, referral and affiliate deals, and reseller or co-selling partnerships.

A partner marketing strategy decides which partners to work with, what you offer their customers together, which campaigns you run, and how you share and measure the results. The 34 tactics below follow that order.

Key Takeaways

• Surfe reached its first $1 million in revenue in about a year and a half solely through partnerships with HubSpot and Pipedrive, without a sales team, co-founder David Chevalier told Founderpath in 2026.
• PPC Ad Lab grew from zero to about $700K ARR in its first year, seven months of it full time, with one partner webinar a month and its own webinar every three months as its only growth channel, founder Robert Warner said in his Founderpath talk.
• Factors.ai co-founder Sri Swaminathan said in his 2024 Founderpath talk that strategic partnerships take about one and a half to two years before they produce revenue.
• HubSpot’s App Marketplace requires at least three active installs from unaffiliated accounts before an app can be listed, and completes an initial review of a listing within 10 business days (HubSpot developer docs, October 2026).
• Postalytics signed up more than 450 paying customers after launching in 2018, the vast majority of them HubSpot customers who found it through its content marketing and the HubSpot Connect partner program, CEO Dennis Kelly told Nathan Latka in December 2018.

What Is Partner Marketing?

Channeltivity, a partner relationship software company, defines partner marketing as a go-to-market strategy in which two companies collaborate to get in front of and convert their ideal customers. The partner brings an audience that already trusts it; you bring a product or expertise that makes its customers more successful. Both sides gain reach they could not buy as cheaply alone.

The terms overlap. Co-marketing usually means a joint campaign, such as a webinar, report or event, run by two companies for both audiences. Mailchimp’s co-marketing guide separates it from co-branding, where two companies create a new product or service that carries both names; co-marketing only joins forces on promotion. Partner marketing is the wider program: it also covers integrations, marketplace listings, referral and affiliate partners, agencies and resellers.

Affiliate marketing is one part of it. Affiliates promote your product for a commission on each customer they refer, and the relationship is mostly transactional; a co-marketing partner shares the work and the audience with you and is usually not paid per sale. Our affiliate marketing guide covers commission programs in depth.

The six types of marketing partners

Most SaaS partner programs use some mix of six partner types. They differ in how much work each takes and how long it takes before they pay off. Co-marketing partners and affiliate or referral partners can pay off in days to weeks: a joint webinar can produce customers within a week. Agencies, integration and marketplace partners, and resellers usually take months. A strategic or co-selling partnership with a large platform can take one and a half to two years before it produces revenue.

How to Build a Partner Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps

Each step has a test that tells you when to move on. A common failure is skipping the first two steps: partners announce a partnership before either side knows what the other’s customers get from it.

Step	What you do	Move on when
1. Pick partners	Find companies that sell to your customer without competing with you	You have 3-5 named partners with a clear audience overlap
2. Build the joint offer	Agree what customers get from using both products, and the terms	Both sides can state the better-together story in one sentence
3. Run joint campaigns	Webinars, content, newsletters and events for both audiences	One campaign has produced leads you can count
4. Integrate and list	Build the integration and list it in the partner’s marketplace	The listing brings installs without a campaign
5. Add paid and sales partners	Agencies, referral and affiliate partners, resellers, co-selling	Partners bring deals you did not source yourself
6. Measure and scale	Track every partner’s leads, pipeline and cost	You know which partners to double down on

34 Partner Marketing Tactics to Generate Partner Leads

The tactics below sit under those six steps, in the order you need them. Each one is a single action you can assign to someone this week.

Step 1: Pick partners who sell to your customer

1. List the tools your customers already use with yours. Ask in onboarding, read integration requests and check which apps customers connect most. Those vendors reach your buyer without competing with you.
2. Choose audience overlap over brand size. A smaller partner whose customers match yours will promote you harder, and its audience will convert better, than a famous brand whose customers only partly fit.
3. Look for gaps in a big platform’s product. A platform that lacks a feature its customers need has a reason to send them to you, as the SpeedSize example below shows.
4. Compare customer lists before you pitch. Overlapping accounts and target segments show both sides the size of the opportunity. Account-mapping tools do this without either company handing over its full customer list.
5. Start with the people already around your product. Agencies and consultants who implement it, communities your buyers belong to and newsletters they read are partners that need no introduction.
6. Keep the list short and give each partnership an owner. Three to five active partners, each with one person responsible on your side, beat twenty logos on a partner page that nobody works with.

GetAccept CEO Samir Smajic described the fit test in a 2018 interview with Nathan Latka: CRMs like HubSpot and Pipedrive sell to the same kind of customers as GetAccept, and its tool makes their product stickier. It took a while to get their interest, he said, but once GetAccept had it, the CRM partners drove a lot of leads. SpeedSize, an image and video compression company, went further. Co-founder Vlad Malanin said it pivoted from direct sales to partnerships and became a premium AWS partner; because AWS has no built-in image and video compression of its own, AWS offers SpeedSize as its solution.

Step 2: Build a better-together offer

7. Write the better-together story in one sentence. State what a customer gets from using both products that neither gives alone. If you can’t, the partnership is a logo swap.
8. Find the metric your partner is paid on, and move it. Seats, usage, retention or upsells: a partner promotes you when you make its own numbers grow.
9. Offer the partner’s audience something only they get. An extended trial, a founder price or a bonus with a deadline gives their customers a reason to act now rather than later.
10. Hand over finished assets. Write the webinar titles, email copy, social posts and landing page yourself, so the partner only has to press send.
11. Agree the terms in writing before launch. Cover who owns the leads and how they are shared with the contact’s consent, how each side may use the other’s name and logo, any commission or revenue share, and when the agreement ends.

Surfe, a CRM and LinkedIn tool, built its first partnerships on tactic 8. When Nathan Latka asked co-founder David Chevalier how Surfe got its first 100 customers, he answered that it was all partnerships:

We looked at our partners like HubSpot and Pipedrive and why are they growing, what is their North Star metric, let’s say. And then we try to find a product angle how we can improve that North Star metric. So let’s say, for instance, HubSpot. HubSpot’s pricing plans, they work according to the number of users. So if you have more users, let’s say, in your marketing hub in HubSpot, you need to pay up a higher price. And we came to them and said, hey, listen. When people use Surfe plus HubSpot from day one, you will have faster upsells because people had more contacts in a shorter time.

David Chevalier, Co-founder & CEO, Surfe ($15M revenue). Watch at 4:51

Chevalier said Surfe reached its first $1 million in a year and a half solely through partnerships, without a sales team.

Step 3: Run joint campaigns for both audiences

12. Co-host a webinar. Each side invites its own list, one person from each company presents, and the replay goes to everyone who registered. Our guide to webinars that convert covers the format.
13. Swap promotions. You present the partner’s offer to your list and the partner presents yours to its list, on the same schedule.
14. Publish a joint report or benchmark. Combining both companies’ data or survey answers gives each audience something neither company could publish alone, and it gives the press a reason to cover it.
15. Write for each other’s blogs. Guest posts and co-authored guides on a shared customer problem put your expertise in front of an audience that already trusts the host.
16. Trade newsletter mentions. A short feature in the partner’s newsletter reaches readers who open it every week, and costs nothing but a feature in return.
17. Run events together. Co-host a breakfast, a roundtable or a meetup, or share a booth or a sponsorship at a conference both audiences attend. Splitting the cost lets two small companies afford a live event neither would run alone.
18. Build a co-branded free tool or template. A calculator, checklist or template set that uses both products keeps working long after a webinar ends.
19. Publish a joint customer story. A case study of one customer using both products is the strongest proof of the better-together story, and both sales teams can send it.

PPC Ad Lab, a competitor-research tool for Google advertisers, ran tactics 12 and 13 as its main growth channel for a year, alongside one webinar of its own every three months. Founder Robert Warner first launched to his own agency contacts with a seven-day sequence: invitation emails on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the live webinar on Thursday evening, a live encore on Friday, replays over the weekend, and the offer closing on Monday. He then ran the same sequence with partners’ lists, a typical webinar swap: PPC Ad Lab gave each partner the webinar titles, the email copy and the replays, promoted the partner’s offer to its own audience, and tracked each partner’s total earnings, commission, live conversion rate and earnings per attendee, so the next partner could see the numbers.

If you can find the right partners and you can pull a deal off, and I would suggest to be bold, you can pull some seriously big numbers into your business … All we’ve done all year, this is literally the only thing we’ve done, is we’ve run a partner webinar once a month, we’re running one of our own once every three months, and that’s taken us from zero to about 700k in seven months full time.

Robert Warner, Founder, PPC Ad Lab. Watch at 20:09

Step 4: Integrate and list in partner marketplaces

20. Build the integration your shared customers ask for. An integration turns a one-off campaign into a reason for every customer of the partner to find you, every day.
21. List it in the partner’s app marketplace. Read the listing rules first. HubSpot’s App Marketplace, for example, requires at least three active installs from HubSpot accounts unaffiliated with your company before an app can be listed, and its team completes an initial review within 10 business days.
22. Climb the marketplace rankings. Installs, reviews and a fast setup move a listing up. Ask happy customers for a review on the partner’s marketplace, not only on your own site.
23. Join the partner’s program tiers. Higher tiers of a partner program often come with co-marketing support, directory placement and access to the partner’s team.
24. Publish an integration page and help docs on your own site. People search for “your product + partner” before they install; answer that search yourself.
25. Launch the integration together. Announce it in both products, both changelogs and both newsletters on the same day.

At Surfe, the integration and the listing did most of the work. Chevalier said users had to reach the product’s value within about thirty seconds, and that by applying the product-led growth playbook Surfe climbed to number one in the HubSpot and Pipedrive marketplaces. When Latka pointed to 40,000 users of its Chrome extension and 12,000 installs on HubSpot’s marketplace, Chevalier confirmed that those two listings were the major drivers of Surfe’s first one to two million in revenue. Postalytics, a direct mail tool, found the same pattern: after its 2018 launch, CEO Dennis Kelly told Nathan Latka in December 2018, the vast majority of its 450+ customers were HubSpot customers who found it through its content marketing and its investment in the HubSpot Connect partner program, including co-marketing and co-selling. More marketplace tactics are in our app marketplace growth guide.

Watch David Chevalier’s full interview on how Surfe grew to $15M ARR with CRM partnerships.

Step 5: Add agency, referral, reseller and co-selling partners

26. Work with agencies and consultants who serve your customer. They choose tools for their clients, so one agency can bring many customers. Expect to give before you get.
27. Start a referral or affiliate program. Pay partners a commission for each customer they bring. Our affiliate marketing guide covers commission models, tracking and payouts.
28. Pay partners in a way they notice. A commission that matters to the partner wins its attention over every other tool it could promote that month.
29. Offer resellers and white-label partners a margin. Resellers sell your product under their contract or their own brand, often in markets you can’t reach. See our guide to reseller and co-marketing programs.
30. Co-sell with the partner’s sales team. When both sales teams work the same account, the partner’s rep introduces you to a buyer who already trusts them. Use account-based marketing plays to pick the accounts together.

Sri Swaminathan, co-founder of the B2B analytics company Factors.ai, said agencies became a partner channel only after a period of giving more than it got:

Now we have agencies coming inbound to us to start working with us. So in a sense, the first set of agencies which you work with are like totally non-transactional, where like you give a lot more than you can actually even remotely get, but over a period of time this becomes a kind of a strategic partnership.

Sri Swaminathan, Co-Founder, Factors.ai ($7.5M revenue). Watch at 16:58

Tactic 28 can be bold. For an upcoming partner launch, Warner said PPC Ad Lab was paying 100% of month-one revenue as a commission, because customers from partner launches stayed. Tactic 30 takes patience: Swaminathan said Factors.ai’s co-selling deal with G2 began when he met G2’s CEO Godard Abel in person at SaaStr. About nine months later G2 published a blog post about Factors.ai, and the two were signing an annual contract and partnership agreement.

Step 6: Measure and scale what works

31. Give every partner its own link, code or deal field. Without one, partner leads disappear into “direct” and “organic” and nobody can tell which partner worked.
32. Track partner-sourced and partner-influenced deals separately. Sourced deals came from the partner; influenced deals were already in your pipeline and the partner helped close them. Both matter, but only one is new demand.
33. Compare each partner’s cost per customer with your other channels. Include commissions, content and staff time, then check the result with a CAC calculator and a payback period calculator.
34. Repeat what worked and give partnerships time. Run the same campaign again with the partners who delivered, show new partners the numbers from the last one, and judge strategic partnerships over years, not quarters.

Swaminathan put the timeline plainly: in his talk he said strategic partnerships take about one and a half to two years before they start to produce revenue, so Factors.ai ran them in parallel with paid search and faster experiments rather than instead of them.

Funding Partner-Led Growth Without Giving Up Equity

Partner marketing pays back slowly at the start: integrations, events and commissions cost money before the partner’s customers arrive, and a strategic partnership can take more than a year to produce revenue. Founders who grow this way can fund it from revenue rather than sell equity for it.

Founderpath provides non-dilutive capital for bootstrapped software founders. Connect your billing, banking and accounting data, and Founderpath shows you what you qualify for, with every figure disclosed up front. There’s no pitch deck, no equity and no board seats.

Check what you qualify for. It takes less than 5 minutes.

Partner Marketing FAQ

What is partner marketing?

Partner marketing is when two companies that sell to the same customers without competing promote each other or market together, so each reaches the other’s audience. Common forms are co-hosted webinars and events, joint content, integrations and app marketplace listings, referral and affiliate deals, and reseller or co-selling partnerships.

What are some examples of partner marketing strategies?

Examples include co-hosting a webinar with a partner and inviting both lists, swapping newsletter features, publishing a joint report, building an integration and listing it in the partner’s app marketplace, paying agencies or affiliates a commission for referrals, and co-selling with a partner’s sales team. Surfe reached its first $1 million in revenue through HubSpot and Pipedrive partnerships and marketplace listings, without a sales team.

What is an example of co-marketing?

A joint webinar is the most common example: two companies with the same customers pick a topic, each invites its own audience, both present, and both follow up with the registrants. PPC Ad Lab ran a partner webinar swap once a month, giving each partner the webinar titles, the email copy and the replays, and promoting the partner’s offer to its own list in return.

How do you find co-marketing partners?

Start with the tools your customers already use alongside yours: ask in onboarding, read integration requests and check which apps customers connect. Add the agencies, communities and newsletters your buyers rely on. Choose partners with a strong audience overlap over famous brands, and pitch each one with what its customers gain and which of its metrics you improve.

What is the difference between partner marketing and affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one type of partner marketing. An affiliate promotes your product for a commission on each customer it refers, and the relationship is mostly transactional. A co-marketing partner shares the work and its audience with you on joint campaigns, integrations or events, and is usually not paid per sale.

Is co-branding legal?

Yes. Co-branding and co-marketing are common and legal when both companies agree to them. Put the terms in writing before launch: how each company may use the other’s name, logo and trademarks, who owns the leads and how they are shared with the contact’s consent, any revenue share, and how the agreement ends. Ask a lawyer to review the agreement.

How long does partner marketing take to work?

It depends on the partner type. A joint webinar or promotion can produce customers within a week. An integration and marketplace listing usually takes months to climb the rankings. Factors.ai co-founder Sri Swaminathan said strategic partnerships take about one and a half to two years before they produce revenue.

How do you measure partner marketing ROI?

Give every partner its own tracking link, code or CRM field, then track the leads, pipeline and revenue each partner sources or influences. Divide what the partnership costs, including commissions, content and staff time, by the customers it brought, and compare that customer acquisition cost and payback period with your other channels.

Sources and Method

Every figure and quote in this guide was checked against its source on October 28, 2026. Outside sources: Channeltivity’s complete guide to partner marketing (definition), Mailchimp’s co-marketing guide (co-marketing and co-branding) and HubSpot’s developer documentation on App Marketplace listing requirements. Founder figures and quotes come from published Founderpath interviews and talks by David Chevalier (Surfe), Robert Warner (PPC Ad Lab), Sri Swaminathan (Factors.ai) and Vlad Malanin (SpeedSize), each linked to the moment it was said, and from Nathan Latka’s 2018 interviews with the CEOs of Postalytics and GetAccept, linked to the moment on YouTube. An earlier version of this post listed more than 40 company examples from video interviews; the ones we could not check against what was said were removed, including one growth figure that the founder credited to his sales team rather than to partnerships.