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Work backwards from the number: a partner pipeline planner

A revenue target is not a plan until you know the coverage underneath it. Run your number and see what the partner motion has to produce.

Most partner targets are set the lazy way: take last year, add a percentage, call it a plan. The number looks reasonable in the deck and falls apart in the field, because nobody worked out the coverage underneath it.

Coverage is the honest question. If partners are meant to contribute a share of new revenue, that share implies a specific volume of deals, a larger volume of qualified opportunities, and a total pipeline several times the size of the target. Miss any of those and the number was never going to land, regardless of how committed the partners were.

The planner below runs that math backwards from your target.

Partner pipeline planner

Run your number

Deals to close86
Opportunities needed390
Total pipeline required€13,636,363.64
Partner-sourced pipeline required€4,090,909.09

Deals to close and opportunities needed are rounded up to whole numbers; pipeline figures are exact.

Can your partner motion actually produce this?

How to read it

Start with the revenue you want from the period and the share you expect partners to contribute. The tool works down from there:

  • Deals to close comes from the target divided by your average contract value.

  • Opportunities needed applies your win rate. A 22% win rate means roughly four and a half qualified opportunities for every closed deal.

  • Total pipeline required is what has to be in the system to support that, and it is almost always larger than leaders expect.

  • Partner-sourced pipeline is that number scaled to the contribution you are asking partners to carry.

The gap between the pipeline this shows and what your partners actually generate is the real state of the program. Closing it is rarely about recruiting more partners. It is about the operating model underneath the number: how partners are segmented, enabled, and routed so the coverage exists. That operating model is the subject of the book.

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