SaaS Partnerships Insights

Ask a Customer Success leader what good looks like and they'll bury you in numbers. SaaS Capital's 2025 retention benchmark puts median NRR at 102% for companies with ACVs between $25,000 and $50,000, with a top quartile of 111%. High Alpha's 2025 benchmarks say retaining roughly nine out of ten customers is now the norm. Gainsight can tell you that 72% of CS teams use health score as their primary non-revenue metric and that CS qualified leads jumped from 27% to 52% in two y

Most partnership programs have at least one partner that everyone internally knows isn't performing. The deals aren't closing. The pipeline is mostly noise. The relationship is cordial but commercially thin. And yet the partner stays — sometimes for years. This isn't an accident. It's the result of a set of structural and psychological patterns that make it easier to keep the relationship going than to honestly assess whether it's working. Understanding those patterns is the

In SaaS, partnership leadership is easy to describe badly. A lot of people reduce it to sourcing deals, managing integrations, or keeping partners happy. That is part of the job, but it misses the real point. The strongest partnership leaders do three things especially well. They connect partnership strategy to business priorities. They influence teams that do not report to them. And they think beyond the company itself, with a clear view of the wider ecosystem. That is where