Promote monthly, demote every six months. Most programs fall into that gap by accident. This is deliberate behavioral design, not leniency.
Partners who are climbing need monthly feedback to stay motivated. If the score only updates each quarter, you build a full quarter of lag into the system. Monthly upside tells a partner that what they do this month counts this month.
The six-month wait on demotion does something else. It splits the drive to climb from the fear of one bad quarter. A partner who slips in March does not drop a tier until the September review. That gives a good partner room to recover from one weak quarter without losing everything they built.
Programs that promote and demote at the same speed create a different problem: partners start playing it safe. Field reps at partner firms stick to what they know instead of trying new things that might dip a number. The tier stops being a goal to climb toward and becomes a position to protect.
That gap between fast promotion and slow demotion is what makes a scoring model drive the right behavior across the whole portfolio, instead of just ranking partners by who had the best quarter.