Our second thought-leadership webinar brought together founders, CROs, partner managers, and customer success leaders who are all trying to grow through partners. This post started as a recap of that session. We have updated it with what we have learned since, because the poll we ran that day turned out to describe a pattern we kept seeing across 27 partner-recruitment webinars.
What the audience told us
We asked one question: "What is your biggest challenge at the moment with your partner program?" The answers:
- 42% Recruiting and activating the right partners
- 27% Driving consistent partner engagement
- 19% Scaling partner-sourced pipeline
- 12% Managing and automating partner operations
That was one room on one afternoon. Across the wider Cinna Mon poll dataset, 39.6% of 2,591 partner-program leaders named recruiting as their number-one challenge. The single session was not an outlier; it was the norm.
What the discussion taught us
Recruiting and activating are two different problems
Most of the leaders in the session had no shortage of partners who had signed something. What they lacked was partners who had closed a deal. Getting a logo on the partner page is recruitment; getting the first registered opportunity is activation, and it is the second step that most programs never plan for. Onboarding, enablement, and a co-selling motion have to exist before the recruitment push, or the partners recruited simply go quiet.
Events raise awareness; they do not recruit on their own
Several attendees had run partner-recruitment webinars of their own and reported the same experience we had across our engagements: good attendance, warm conversations, very few signatures. A webinar is a useful way to get in front of the right partners. It is not a substitute for a continuous recruitment motion, run inside the program, with an ideal-partner-profile list and someone with a sales mandate doing the follow-up. We have written up those lessons in detail in What We Learned Running 27 Partner-Recruitment Webinars.
Engagement problems are usually incentive problems
The 27% who cited engagement mostly described partners who were enthusiastic at signing and absent three months later. When we dug into the details, the incentives were built for the vendor's convenience rather than the partner's business model: margins that only pay on large deals, deal registration that protects the vendor but not the partner, and enablement that assumes the partner has time to spare. Fixing the incentive design is often the quickest engagement win available.
Operations come last, and that is fine
Only 12% named operations and automation as their top problem, and we think that is the right order. A partner portal or PRM does not create partners. It makes an existing motion cheaper to run at scale. Programs that tooled up before they had a working recruitment and activation process ended up with a well-organised empty portal.
What we do with this now
These sessions changed how we structure our own work. Recruitment is no longer something we run as a stand-alone event or campaign; it is a continuous part of the Fractional Partner Leader engagement, alongside onboarding, enablement, and partner management, so that the partners we attract are activated rather than simply listed. We continue to host thought-leadership sessions for the partner community and to publish what the polls tell us.
If recruiting or activating partners is your biggest challenge too, we offer a free partner-program audit: a 60-minute recorded call followed by a written diagnostic and recommendations.