When Donagh Kiernan started his first software business in 1994, partnerships weren’t a growth strategy—they were a survival mechanism. Two decades and one successful exit later, the founder and CEO of Tenego Partnering, has spent 16 years helping technology companies crack the code on partnership programs that actually drive revenue.

His session at the Orbit Growth Summit revealed why most startups get partnerships catastrophically wrong and how the best-performing companies think about their channel strategy.

The uncomfortable truth is: most partnership programs fail because founders fundamentally misunderstand what motivates partners to act.

The Revenue Share Trap

“Every business leader can make money in a million ways,” Donagh explained to Orbit founders. “They’ve already chosen what way they want to make money. That’s their business today. Can you help them get more business of the type they want?”

This cuts to the heart of why throwing revenue percentages at potential partners rarely works. When a startup approaches a consultant, marketplace, or system integrator with a standard revenue-sharing proposition, they’re essentially asking that partner to change their entire business model. The math doesn’t add up—and neither does the motivation.

Consider the economics: if you’re offering a 20% revenue share to a partner whose salespeople already earn higher commissions than your entire deal size, you’re not solving their problem. You’re creating friction.

The companies that build scalable partnership programs understand that revenue share is table stakes, not the main course. They solve for partner motivation by addressing three fundamental questions:

• How does this help them serve their existing customers better?
• How does this align with where they want to take their business?
• How does this remove barriers in their customer journey?

The Customer Journey Mapping Revolution

The most successful partnership strategies start with customer journey mapping—but not your customer journey, your partner’s customer journey.

Donagh walked through how different partner types intersect with customer needs at various stages.

• Consultants appear when customers recognize they have a problem but haven’t defined the solution.
• Marketplaces provide validation and ecosystem credibility.
• System integrators handle implementation complexity.
• Service providers ensure ongoing success.

Each partner type has different motivations, capabilities, and business models. The startups that scale through partnerships understand these differences and craft specific value propositions for each segment.

Take the example of a protein bar company targeting fitness trainers. The obvious partnership play is co-branding or lead sharing. But the deeper opportunity lies in understanding what fitness trainers actually need to grow their business—credibility, client retention, differentiation from competitors. A partnership that addresses these core needs while selling protein bars creates sustainable competitive advantage.

The Three Pillars of Partnership Success

Donagh’s framework distills partnership success into three non-negotiable pillars:

Right Company Types: Partners must share access to your target customers and solve related problems. The closer the customer overlaps, the more natural the partnership becomes.

Suitable Capabilities: Partners need the skills, tools, and resources to deliver value. This isn’t just about their technology stack—it’s about their sales process, customer success capabilities, and organizational bandwidth.

Business Alignment: The ideal scenario is when your product fits seamlessly into their business model without requiring operational changes. The less you ask them to modify their existing processes, the faster they’ll adopt and scale.

This framework explains why many technology partnerships fail. Companies celebrate getting approved for AWS Marketplace or Oracle’s partner program, but these platforms provide technology integration, not sales acceleration. Unless you’re solving a specific go-to-market challenge, platform partnerships rarely drive meaningful revenue growth.

The Enablement Imperative

The gap between partnership agreements and partnership performance almost always comes down to enablement. Donagh observes that too many startups “walk in the door and speak to the CEO, get alignment on the business case, sign an agreement, and hope it works.”

Reality check: it won’t.

Successful partnership programs require understanding your partner’s sales process, marketing channels, customer success workflow, and decision-making hierarchy. You need to identify the specific moments where your product creates value and make it effortless for partner teams to recognize and act on those opportunities.

This means moving beyond executive relationships to enable the people who actually interact with customers. The marketing team needs messaging frameworks. The sales team needs talk tracks and objection handling. The customer success team needs implementation playbooks.

The companies that excel at partner enablement treat it like customer onboarding—structured, measurable, and continuously optimized.

The Cultural Complexity of International Partnerships

For startups expanding internationally, partnerships aren’t just about market access—they’re about cultural translation. Donagh shared a critical insight: “Culture is a greater challenge than language in international partnerships.”

Many cultures will never give direct negative feedback, regardless of how you ask. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where partnerships appear successful on the surface while failing operationally. The solution requires local partners who understand both explicit and implicit communication patterns.

This dynamic becomes even more complex when evaluating partnership performance across different markets. What looks like partner resistance might actually be cultural miscommunication. What appears to be strong alignment might be polite deflection.

The startups that scale internationally through partnerships invest heavily in local relationship building and cultural competency. They use partners not just for sales distribution but for market intelligence and feedback interpretation.

The Partnership Journey Milestones

Donagh outlined a progression of partnership program maturity that moves from basic partner identification to scalable revenue generation. The companies that achieve sustainable growth through partnerships follow a disciplined milestone approach:

M1-M3: Partner profiling, proposition development, and initial validation

M4-M6: Pilot program execution, onboarding optimization, and enablement refinement

M7+: Scale operations, program expansion, and advanced partnership types

Most startups try to skip the early milestones and jump directly to scale. They want the “hockey stick” partner revenue curve without building the operational foundation that makes it possible.

The most successful partnership programs treat these milestones as learning opportunities, not just execution checkpoints. They gather feedback, refine their approach, and build capabilities that compound over time.

The Competitive Advantage Hidden in Plain Sight

Perhaps the most provocative insight from Donagh’s session was about competitive positioning through partnerships. Instead of targeting market leaders, focus on “aggressive followers”—companies that want to differentiate themselves from incumbents.

These partners are more willing to experiment with new solutions, faster to implement changes, and motivated to find competitive advantages. They’re also more likely to provide meaningful feedback and iterate on partnership models.

This approach requires a fundamental shift in how startups think about partner selection. The biggest, most established companies in your space might seem like the obvious targets, but they’re often the least motivated to change their existing processes.

The Road Ahead

Donagh emphasizes that partnerships should be treated as a continuous learning process, similar to customer acquisition. The companies that build scalable partnership programs start small, test assumptions, and refine their approach based on real-world feedback.

For startups looking to scale through partnerships, the path forward isn’t about finding the right partners—it’s about becoming the right kind of partner. That means understanding your value proposition beyond revenue share, building enablement capabilities that actually work, and treating partnerships as a strategic competency rather than a tactical add-on.

The partnership paradox isn’t that revenue share doesn’t matter—it’s that revenue share alone will never be enough to motivate partners to change their business for you. The companies that crack this code build partnerships that create value for everyone involved, starting with the customer and working backward to sustainable competitive advantage.

Donagh Kiernan is the founder of Tenego Partnering. His company helps technology companies build and scale partner programs internationally.

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Orbit Growth Summit is where Orbit founders learn growth tactics from top experts in product-led growth, performance marketing, and scalable systems.