90-Day Partnership Launch Plan for Newly Acquired Portfolio Companies

Day Zero: What You’re Walking Into

You’ve just closed on a B2B software company. The product is solid, the customers are real, and the growth thesis makes sense. But when you ask about partnerships, you get shrugs. There’s no partner program. No partner manager. No CRM tracking. Maybe a few informal referral relationships that nobody’s tracking.

This is actually a good position. It means there’s untapped revenue sitting in the ecosystem with no infrastructure cost against it. Here’s how to stand it up in 90 days.

Days 1-15: Discovery and Mapping

Interview the sales team. Ask: "Where do your best leads come from that aren’t marketing or outbound?" You’ll hear names. Consulting firms, implementation partners, technology vendors whose products sit adjacent to yours. Write them all down.

Pull CRM data on closed-won deals from the last 12 months. Look for patterns: are certain industries, company sizes, or deal types associated with faster closes or higher ACVs? These patterns often point to latent partner influence that’s not being tracked.

Map the competitive landscape. Who are your portco’s competitors partnering with? This is public information — check their websites, marketplace listings, and press releases.

Days 16-30: Infrastructure

Set up the CRM fields for partner attribution (sourced, influenced, attached). This is non-negotiable and takes 2-3 hours in Salesforce or HubSpot.

Create a simple partner tracking spreadsheet or CRM view that captures: partner name, partner type (technology, referral, channel, consulting), primary contact, status (prospect, active, inactive), and pipeline attribution.

Draft a one-page partner value proposition: why should someone partner with your portco? What’s in it for them? This doesn’t need to be polished — it needs to be honest.

Days 31-60: First Partnerships

Pick 3 partners from your discovery list. Prioritize by: existing relationship strength, overlap in customer base, and speed to first deal. Reach out. Have the conversation. Sign a simple partner agreement (this can be a one-page MOU, not a 30-page contract).

For each partner, define one joint motion: a co-sell play, a referral agreement, or a joint webinar. Something that generates pipeline within 30 days of activation.

Days 61-90: Prove the Model

Track everything. Partner-sourced leads, partner-influenced opportunities, pipeline value, deal velocity. At day 90, you should be able to answer: how many deals did partners contribute to? What’s the pipeline value? How does deal velocity compare?

Build the first monthly partnership report. Present it to leadership. The numbers don’t need to be massive — they need to exist. A $200K partner-sourced pipeline in 60 days proves the model works and justifies investment.

What Comes After Day 90

If the model works (it usually does), the next step is hiring. Now you have the infrastructure, the data, and the proof points to write a job description for a partnership manager that includes actual KPIs and a clear mandate. You’re hiring someone to scale a working program, not figure out if partnerships work.

That’s the difference between building it right and hoping for the best.