Let’s be honest. Running a partner program looks great on a slide. In practice, it’s messy.
You’re managing relationships, driving adoption, answering leadership questions, and trying to prove impact, all while your data lives in too many places. If you run a partner marketplace or integration ecosystem, the complexity only grows.
When teams talk to us about what’s breaking down, it usually comes back to one thing: visibility. No shared view of performance, no clear answers, and a lot of manual work to fill the gaps.
Here are four partner marketplace pain points we see constantly, plus what actually fixes them.
Partners can’t see the value they’re creating
Partners want to know if their effort is worth it. Most can’t tell.
They publish a listing, launch an integration, maybe run a campaign, and then hear nothing back. No clear signal on leads, revenue, or even basic engagement.
“Our partners want to know how many leads they’re driving and how much revenue they’re generating.”
When partners can’t see impact, motivation drops quickly.
The fix:
Give partners direct access to their own performance data. Not a quarterly email. Not a spreadsheet. A self-serve view where they can see listing views, leads, referrals, and attributed revenue tied to the marketplace.
Visibility drives behavior. When partners can see what’s working, they invest more.
Partner managers are stuck chasing updates
If your calendar is full of “quick check-ins” just to find out what partners are doing, something’s broken.
Manual outreach doesn’t scale, and it keeps partner managers reactive instead of strategic.
“I’m having to go to each partner and say, ‘What are you doing to make this successful?’”
The fix:
Centralize partner activity in one place. Listings, deal registrations, updates, and performance should all live inside the marketplace experience. Plus, updates should be synced between your partner directory and in-app marketplace, so they only need to be made once.
Partners update once. You get real-time visibility. No follow-ups required.
Partners don’t want another tool
This one’s real. Partners are busy, and they’re skeptical of anything that feels like extra work.
If updating your marketplace feels like busywork, adoption will stall.
“I have to tell our partners, ‘We’re going to use this tool,’ and they come back with, ‘I don’t have time to update another tool.’”
The fix:
The marketplace has to earn its place.
Make it the single place partners apply, manage their listing, submit updates, and see results. Keep it intuitive. Make the value obvious the moment they log in.
Plus, with an AI listing builder, you can create partner pages at scale yourself, and then show value before you ask them to do work.
When the marketplace replaces work instead of adding to it, resistance disappears.
Proving partner ROI to leadership is harder than it should be
Eventually, someone asks the question: is this actually working?
If answering requires stitching together CRM exports, spreadsheets, and internal dashboards, you’re already behind.
“My CEO or SVP asks, ‘What’s working in our partner marketplace?’ and I have to pull data from multiple sources to answer.”
The fix:
Use partner marketplace software that provides a single source of truth for partner performance.
Leadership doesn’t need every detail. They need clear signals. Which integrations drive demand. How the ecosystem impacts revenue and retention. What’s trending up or down.
When marketplace analytics are centralized and credible, partner programs stop being a cost center and start being a growth lever.
Ready to stop guessing?
If you’re spending more time chasing data than acting on it, the system isn’t doing its job.
Partner marketplaces work best when everyone can see what’s happening, partners included.
A smarter way to run partner programs
None of these pain points are rare. They’re what happens when partner programs outgrow spreadsheets and one-off tools.
The fix isn’t more process. It’s better infrastructure.
When your marketplace gives partners visibility, reduces manual work, and makes performance easy to understand, everything else gets easier. Better conversations. Better decisions. Better outcomes.
