Context · Growth motion
Partner-led
Growth arrives through affiliates, resellers, or integrations, and someone else owns the customer relationship and usually the data about it.
What changes here
The same four questions, and what each one runs into in this context.
Attribution
Partner-reported conversions arrive on the partner's definitions and windows, and partners are incentivized to claim credit, which last-touch rewards. Reconcile the definitions before the numbers.
Incrementality
Holding out a partner is a commercial negotiation with relationship consequences rather than a design choice, and partners decide their own launch timing, so assignment is often not yours to control or even to observe.
Allocation
The commission structure drives behavior more than any budget decision you make, and margin varies by partner in ways a blended CAC hides.
Decisioning
You rarely control the contact, so the unit of decision is the partner rather than the customer: which partners to invest in, not which people to treat.
Written for this context
Incrementality
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When Randomization Is Impossible
Difference-in-differences, synthetic control, and interrupted time series. What each one assumes, the diagnostic that would falsify it, and how far wrong the same estimator goes when the assumption fails.
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When the Rollout Was Staggered
Markets adopt in waves and the effect grows after adoption. The regression everyone runs on that panel uses early adopters as controls for late ones and understates the effect by a third. What to run instead, and the plot that shows whether it can be believed.
Systems
- System
The Account Graph
One canonical buying unit, the contacts that resolve to it, the buying episodes in which it can buy, and the state it was in when treated. Two grains at once, and every measurement downstream depends on which one a number is counted at.
- System
Designs When Randomization Is Refused
No sales leader will accept a do-not-touch list on named accounts. What can be assigned is the marketing program itself, with sales left alone in both arms, and after that the territory, the partner, and the order of a staged rollout.
- System
Sourced, Influenced, and What Replaces Them
Two reporting conventions that divide pipeline without a counterfactual, why both are attribution wearing a B2B accent, and the evidence ledger that should sit above them.
- System
Rep Capacity and Account Prioritization
Which accounts get a rep's hour, which is the scarcest allocation on the list. Scoring is easy, and the constraint that decides whether it changes anything is how many hours exist.
- System
The Prioritization Log
Which accounts were ranked, which were assigned work and at what probability, and what was actually done, with a two-sided exploration band around the cutoff so that both working and not working have support near the line. The record that lets the next ranking be evaluated before it ships.