Launching a new path for partnerships

Revenue execution takes a village

One thing I can’t forget from my Salesforce days was that 60 people touch a million-dollar deal. Partnerships make that number explode.

Every company brings another sales team, finance team, legal team, partner ops team, systems, and incentives into the process. One enterprise deal can easily span a hundred people across multiple organizations.

It feels like the cast of Office Space. Everyone is chasing the process instead of the customer.

PRM traditionally stands for Partner Relationship Management. In my experience, the relationship is almost never the thing that breaks.

Two companies figure out they’re better off selling together. Customers overlap, products fit, somebody picks up the phone. People who want to work together usually find a way.

What breaks is everything after the handshake.

A great deal sits in an inbox for a week. Reps stop registering deals because they can’t find the portal password. Two teams claim the same opportunity. Finance spends quarter-end reconciling partner payouts in spreadsheets. When the board asks what the partner program contributed, nobody has an answer they trust.

Revenue execution takes a village. And the village is paying the tax.

Why we ended up here

We didn’t set out to build a PRM.

We started Suger to bring a consumer-grade experience to B2B revenue. The first place we focused was cloud marketplaces because they are one of the hardest revenue motions in software. Every cloud has different rules. Every transaction crosses multiple systems. Money moves in ways that are genuinely difficult to follow.

Customers naturally started asking us to support co-selling because the relationship with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud begins long before the transaction reaches the marketplace.

Then, the same conversations kept coming up with resellers, GSIs, distributors, and technology partners.

One customer put it well.

It’s often not a one-to-one relationship. We might be co-selling with AWS and a channel partner on the same deal.

Three companies. Three systems. Three claims on the same revenue.

Once we had built the engine to coordinate that kind of transaction, we realized the partner type didn’t really matter. The underlying work was always the same. Coordinate the opportunity. Track attribution. Apply program rules. Move the money. Give every team the same answer.

So we pointed the engine at the rest of the partner ecosystem.

What Suger PRM does

Suger PRM runs partner revenue across resellers, GSIs, ISVs, distributors, technology partners, and cloud providers on the same platform.

Specifically:

• Deal registration inside your CRM, where your sales team already works.
• Attribution for deals involving multiple partners.
• Automated partner payouts based on your program rules, pushed directly into your AP system.
• White-labeled partner portal.
• Partner training with a built-in LMS.
• A single source of truth for partner operations, sales, finance, and leadership.
• Deployment in under five days with per-partner pricing.

We built the system that runs the work after companies decide to partner.

Where we’re headed

Suger is becoming the modern stack for how companies generate revenue across every channel.

We’re rebuilding the apps that run the transaction lifecycle, one part at a time. Marketplace was the first. Partner revenue is second. Finance is next. Every finance team we meet is still reconciling indirect revenue by hand across disconnected systems.

Each app fixes the plumbing for one stage of the transaction lifecycle. Underneath all of them is Insulin, doing the coordination work no human was ever going to scale through.

I’ll share more thoughts later on Insulin, our agent platform, built to run securely across our apps and yours, with memory to get smarter with each use. Our belief is that the “village” should focus on revenue-generating work instead of suffering from the coordination tax.

Today, Suger PRM is live in production with customers. Insulin enters private beta this quarter.

If your partner revenue still depends on spreadsheets, portals, and people keeping the process alive by sheer force of will, we’d love to show you another way.