You signed twelve partners. Two of them send everything.

Partner programmes rarely fail at recruitment. They fail because signing an agreement documents a referral habit rather than creating one.

By Steve 9 August 2026 5 min read

A partner programme that has been running for eighteen months usually looks the same from the inside. Twelve or fifteen signed agreements. A partner page on the website. Two partners who send a steady trickle of qualified work, one who sent something good in the first quarter and nothing since, and the rest who have never sent anything at all. The instinct is to work the tail: better collateral, a quarterly check-in, a higher referral fee, a portal login. That instinct is almost always expensive and almost always wrong, because…

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You signed twelve partners. Two of them send everything.

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