The relationship was never the hard part

I want to explain why we’re launching a PRM, but first I have to say something about the name, because it has annoyed me for a while.

PRM stands for Partner Relationship Management. And the relationship is almost never the thing that breaks.

Think about how these partnerships actually start. Two companies figure out they’re better off selling together. Their customers overlap, their products fit, somebody on each side picks up the phone. That part mostly works on its own. People who want to work together tend to find a way to work together.

What falls apart is everything that happens after the handshake.

A partner sends you a great deal and it sits in an inbox for a week, because nobody is quite sure whose job it is to do something with it. Your own reps quietly stop registering deals, because it means logging into yet another portal with a password they’ve already forgotten. Two teams both believe they sourced the same opportunity, and now there’s an awkward conversation about who gets credit. When it’s finally time to pay a partner, someone opens a spreadsheet and starts doing the math by hand. And at the end of the quarter, when the board asks what the partner program actually brought in, the honest answer is usually “give me a couple of days to pull it together.”

None of that is a relationship problem, it’s a plumbing problem. The partners like each other fine, but the system running underneath them is held together with Slack threads, spreadsheets and vibes.

So that’s the part we went after. Although, to be fair, we didn’t set out to build this when we started Suger.

We built Suger to handle marketplace co-sell with the hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft and Google. If you have ever run a hyperscaler co-sell motion, you know it is about the most complicated partnership in all of software. Different rules on every cloud. Deals that have to be registered exactly so or they don’t count. Money that moves in ways that are genuinely hard to follow. We spent a few years getting good at making all of that run quietly in the background.

Then our customers kept telling us the same thing, in slightly different words every time. This mess you fixed for our cloud partners, they’d say, we have the exact same mess everywhere else. Their resellers, their system integrators, the other software companies they build and sell with. Same broken plumbing, every time, and no tool actually built for it. Most of them were running an entire channel program on a spreadsheet and a lot of willpower.

We already had the engine. And it turned out the engine didn’t really care whether the partner on the other end was a hyperscaler or a reseller in Denver. A deal is a deal, and a payout is a payout. So we pointed it at the rest of the partner ecosystem.

That’s what we’re launching today. Suger PRM runs the deals and the money in one place, on the same system we built for the cloud providers. It works for any kind of partner, and nobody needs a marketplace listing for it to work. It goes live in under five days, it costs nothing to set up, and you pay based on how many partners you actually work with, not how many of your own people log in.

I’ll be straight about what we are not trying to be. We’re not here to give you a nicer place to store partner contact details and log your meeting notes. There are tools for that, and some of them are fine. We went after the part that actually costs you money and time, which is getting deals into your pipeline and getting partners paid correctly, without a person babysitting a spreadsheet to make it happen.

We built Suger PRM because the relationship was the one part already working, and almost everything around it wasn’t.

If that sounds like your partner program, come talk to us.