The referral was the job they turned down

Partner-sourced deals often show the best win rate and the lowest acquisition cost in the business: which tells you almost nothing about whether the channel is good.

By Steve 4 min read
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Referral channels flatter themselves in the numbers. A deal that arrives with a trusted introduction converts faster, costs almost nothing to source, and skips most of the credibility-building that a cold pipeline demands. Measured on win rate and acquisition cost, partner-sourced work usually looks like the best channel a business has. Those two metrics are both properties of the introduction, not of the work. What determines whether a referral relationship is worth building capacity around is a different question entirely: what kind of job does your partner decide to send…

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