As I approach the first anniversary of my agency, I’m realizing how much of the business coming in today started well before there was an opportunity.
A relationship. A conversation. Something I wrote. A dinner where nobody was trying to sell anything.
I’ve been intentional about building an inbound business. Looking at what’s working, I recognize the same principle that shaped my career in partnerships.
The job is to build an annuity, regardless of what anyone tells you.
I’m using annuity loosely here. I mean a portfolio of relationships and repeatable business motions that keeps producing because you invested in it.
It takes maintenance. It takes judgment. Some investments never pay off.
But you shouldn’t have to rebuild the entire business every quarter.
The first deal tells you something. The next few tell you more.
Across Microsoft, SYNNEX, and Gong, the products and partner models were different. The underlying questions were remarkably similar.
How does this partner make money? Where do we fit into their business? Why would their sellers spend time on us? What would make them come back with the next customer?
You can get a partner excited enough to do one deal. A strong relationship, a helpful introduction, or an unusually motivated seller might get you there.
Getting the motion to repeat takes more.
The partner needs a financial reason to participate. Their sellers need to understand where you fit. Customers need to get value. And the experience of working with you needs to justify doing it again.
That’s when the work starts to accumulate.
The next seller conversation gets easier because there’s a customer example. The next opportunity moves faster because people know whom to call. The next investment becomes easier to justify because someone can point to revenue.
You’re building an asset inside the business.
Reach, frequency, and yield
Throughout my career, I kept coming back to three measures.
Reach: How many partners were actually transacting or sourcing business?
Frequency: How often were they doing it? Was this an occasional transaction, or had doing business with us become a habit?
Yield: What was the average deal worth?
These were the analytics that told me whether I was building an annuity.
If revenue was growing, I wanted to understand why. Were more partners producing? Were existing partners coming back more often? Were we winning larger deals?
Those are different kinds of progress. They call for different investments.
If a few partners were producing all the revenue, I needed to understand whether we could broaden participation. If plenty of partners did one deal and disappeared, I needed to understand what prevented the second.
And if activity was increasing without much revenue growth, yield deserved a closer look.
A partner bringing a steady volume of smaller transactions could be incredibly valuable. Another might produce fewer opportunities, but each one could be worth substantially more.
I needed to understand the role each played in the portfolio.
That changed how I thought about where to invest time, people, and money.
I use the same lens in my agency now
Building an inbound business started with the basics: clear positioning, a credible website, a consistent social presence, and sharing how I think about the work.
People need to understand what you do, whom you help, and why they should trust you.
Then I focused on a few connected ways to grow.
Our relationships with private equity firms create opportunities to help their portfolio companies. Each engagement gives us a chance to earn trust across a broader portfolio.
Our advisory work often uncovers an execution problem. A client needs help implementing the systems, workflows, and operating processes we recommend. That creates Partner RevOps work.
We deploy what we advise. Vendors see us putting their products to work, and some bring us into other customer opportunities.
Events and dinners give those relationships somewhere to develop. People meet, compare experiences, and stay connected after the evening ends.
Over time, those investments have started feeding each other.
And I ask the same questions I asked during my career.
How many relationships are creating business? How often? What is that business worth?
Some bring higher-value contracts. Others bring a more consistent volume of work. Some open doors to several companies. Others deepen into additional engagements with the same client.
The mix matters. Higher-value contracts and consistent volume each have a role in building the business.
Understanding that mix helps me decide which relationships to develop, which offers to improve, and where my time has the greatest impact.
It also keeps me honest. A relationship can feel promising for a long time. Eventually, I need evidence that the investment is becoming productive.
Partner professionals have to work on two timelines
I understand the quarterly pressure. There’s a number to hit, a forecast to explain, and somebody asking what partnerships produced this month.
You have to deliver.
But if all your work expires at the end of the quarter, you’ll keep finding yourself in the same position: needing another introduction, another campaign, another favor.
The longer-term job is to improve the starting point for the next quarter.
That might mean getting a partner’s second team selling. Fixing a compensation issue that keeps slowing participation. Making deal registration easier. Helping a services partner build a profitable offering around your product.
Some of that work won’t produce revenue before the next forecast call. It can still determine whether the partner produces revenue for the next three years.
Reach, frequency, and yield help connect those timelines. They give you a way to explain what you’re building and assess whether it’s working.
Ask what the work leaves behind
Does this partner have a financial reason to bring us the next customer?
Can their team repeat the motion without me personally pushing every step?
Are more partners becoming productive? Are they coming back? Is the business worth the investment required to support it?
Those questions help distinguish a busy quarter from a business that’s getting stronger.
I can see this more clearly now that I own the business. The work I did months ago is creating opportunities today. The decisions I make today will shape what comes in next year.
That was the job when I worked for someone else, too.
Build something that keeps producing.