Partner types

Real partner ecosystems are not one shape. The same vendor runs affiliates who only drive clicks, referrers who make warm intros, co-sellers who run deals side by side, hyperscalers who co-sell from their own portals and marketplaces, resellers who own the sale, distributors who stand above a whole reseller network, and implementation partners who deliver the outcome after the deal is won. Introw supports the full spectrum, and lets you give each type its own branded, scoped experience.

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The partner spectrum

Partner types differ most in one question: who closes the deal. That single axis shapes almost everything else, from what the partner needs in the portal to how they get paid. The last type is the exception that proves the axis: an implementation partner never closes the deal at all. Someone else wins it, and the implementation partner is pulled in afterward to make the customer succeed. Its needs follow from delivery, not from selling. You rarely run just one. Introw lets you support several at once and give each the experience that fits how they actually work.

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Affiliate

Promotes the product to a large audience through a tracked link and earns a commission on what converts, without ever touching the deal. Affiliates want self-serve links, a live earnings dashboard, ready-to-use creative, and frictionless payouts.

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Referral

Makes a warm, named introduction from their own network and earns a fee if it closes, while your team runs the actual sale. Referrers want a dead-simple way to refer off-portal, visibility into status, and confidence they will be paid.

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Co-sell

Sells side by side with your team on shared accounts, with joint account mapping, joint planning, and orchestrated execution. Co-sellers want to collaborate on the live CRM deal without a CRM seat, shared pipeline, joint action plans, and co-branded assets.

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Hyperscaler

Every other partner type logs into your portal. A hyperscaler - AWS, Microsoft, or Google Cloud - never will: they run their own. You work their co-sell program inside AWS Partner Central, Microsoft Partner Center, or Google Cloud Partner Advantage, and their marketplace often carries the transaction itself, because buyers want to draw the purchase down against cloud spend they have already committed.

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How the co-sell motion works: ACE, referrals, and private offers

AWS runs the most developed version of the pattern. Co-selling happens through ACE (APN Customer Engagements): you share opportunities with AWS through the ACE Pipeline Manager in AWS Partner Central, AWS routes AWS-originated referrals back to you, and AWS field sellers engage on the deals where the better-together story is strong. The transaction itself often closes as an AWS Marketplace private offer, because the purchase draws down the customer’s committed cloud spend (an EDP) and the AWS seller retires quota on marketplace-transacted co-sell - so procurement accelerates and the field is incentivized to push. Microsoft mirrors the motion with Partner Center co-sell referrals, Azure Marketplace, MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment) drawdown, and multiparty private offers; Google Cloud with Partner Advantage and Google Cloud Marketplace private offers. None of that touches your portal - and it doesn’t need to, because the whole motion converges on your CRM. AWS ships the AWS Partner CRM Connector for Salesforce, syncing ACE opportunities, ACE leads, and Marketplace private offers two-way; Microsoft ships co-sell connectors for Salesforce and Dynamics 365; and marketplace platforms such as Tackle, Clazar, WorkSpan, or Suger sync all three clouds into HubSpot and Salesforce. In practice, an ACE opportunity or a private offer is an opportunity record in your CRM - and the CRM is exactly where Introw runs.

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What you want the motion to look like - and how Introw runs it

Ask a SaaS vendor what good hyperscaler collaboration looks like and you hear the same five things. Each one maps onto what Introw already does with the CRM record: And when a channel partner carries the marketplace transaction - CPPO (channel partner private offers) on AWS Marketplace, a multiparty private offer on Azure - the reseller and the hyperscaler sit on the same CRM deal, each attributed and each credited.

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Reseller

Buys and resells the product to their own customers, owning the sale, the margin, and usually delivery. Resellers want self-serve quoting, certification and enablement, deal registration that protects their margin, and clear visibility into what they earn.

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Distributor

Sits above resellers, recruiting, enabling, and aggregating a whole reseller network on your behalf in a two-tier model. Distributors and their resellers need shared credit and visibility on the same deal, which Introw delivers through multi-tier attribution on the CRM record.

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Implementation

Delivers the outcome: deploys, integrates, customizes, migrates data, and onboards the end customer so they actually go live. Someone else closed the deal - the vendor, a reseller, or a co-seller - so the implementation partner is measured on go-live and adoption, not the signature. It is not purely post-sale, though: implementation partners are often pulled into the deal as solution architects to scope the work, design the solution, and lend the delivery credibility that de-risks the purchase. Then their deep integrations, migrated data, and trained users embed the product into the customer’s workflows, which raises switching costs and drives renewal, expansion, and stickiness. Implementation partners want a clean handoff with full deal and account context, project and onboarding tracking on the record, deep certification to be authorised to deliver, and a governed library of solution docs and runbooks.

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One platform, many branded experiences

A bigger ecosystem should never feel like a one-size-fits-all portal. With Introw you build multiple branded experiences, so each partner type lands in something that feels made for them: the affiliate sees a lightweight earnings hub, the reseller sees enablement and deal registration, the distributor sees their network’s pipeline, the hyperscaler seller sees just the shared deals and co-sell content, and the implementation partner sees delivery projects and certification. Each experience carries your branding on a custom domain, while the CRM stays the single source of truth underneath.

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Tailor each experience with segmentation

Branded experiences set the frame; segmentation decides what each partner persona actually sees inside it. Group partners into segments, then scope assets, courses, announcements, pipeline, and permissions to the right segment. A distributor’s resellers see reseller enablement, your top-tier co-sellers see strategic content, implementation consultants see certification and delivery runbooks, and affiliates see only what they need, all from the same platform.

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Where to go next