Has anyone built quota-carrying comp plans for Partnerships / Channel / Strategic Partner roles in payments or fintech?
Hey RevOps folks — looking for input from anyone who has built or managed comp plans for quota-carrying Partnerships, Channel Sales, Strategic Partnerships, or Partner Manager roles, especially in fintech/payments.
I’m trying to understand how companies structure comp for partnership roles where the person is expected to source, onboard, activate, and grow strategic partners — but where there is also an existing direct sales team in market.
The part I’m trying to solve is how to measure performance fairly without creating conflict between Partnerships and Sales.
Some of the factors I’m thinking through:
- Should the role carry a revenue quota, pipeline quota, partner-sourced opportunity quota, partner activation quota, or some combination?
- How do you define partner-sourced vs. partner-influenced vs. co-sold revenue?
- How do you prevent double-crediting between the partner person and the direct AE?
- How do you compensate the partner person when the partner creates distribution, referrals, or influence, but the AE technically closes the deal?
- Do you pay on signed contracts, activated partners, live merchants/customers, revenue, GMV/TPV, or validated run-rate?
- How do you handle long sales cycles or partner onboarding timelines where the partnership work happens months before revenue shows up?
- For strategic partnerships, do you measure partner recruitment/onboarding separately from revenue production?
- How do you avoid incentivizing the partner person to compete with direct sales instead of enabling them?
- How do you design the plan so the partner team complements direct GTM — referrals, co-sell, enablement, partner channel development — rather than creating channel conflict?
For context, I’ve been looking at quota-carrying partner/channel roles at companies like Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Square/Block, Affirm, etc. The job descriptions often reference things like partner-sourced pipeline, channel revenue targets, partner recruitment, partner onboarding/activation, GMV/revenue goals, Salesforce tracking, forecasting, and working with internal sales teams.
What I’d love to hear from people who have actually built or operated these plans:
- What metrics worked best?
- What metrics created bad behaviour?
- How did you define attribution and crediting rules?
- Did the partner role carry an individual quota, team quota, or shared quota with Sales?
- What would you absolutely avoid if you had to rebuild the plan?
Would especially appreciate examples from payments, fintech, SaaS channel sales, marketplace partnerships, or partner-led GTM motions.