Find the right partners for your business

An ideal partner profile describes the kind of firm that's most likely to send you good customers. It covers who the firm's clients are, what service the firm provides them, how it would make money or keep clients happy by recommending you, and what would rule it out. Kite writes it from evidence about your business rather than from guesses.

Kite starts with your customers. It already knows your ideal customer profile, so it asks a practical question: who else do those customers pay for help before, during, or after they buy something like your product? For a company that sells email marketing software to online stores, the answer might be ecommerce agencies, store-setup consultants, and the freelancers who build Shopify themes. For a company that sells security software to mid-sized businesses, it might be managed IT providers.

If you already have partners that work well, Kite studies what they have in common, such as the size of their client base, the services they sell, the region they work in, and how they found you. If you connect HubSpot or Salesforce, Kite can also look through your deals and contacts for customers that arrived through another firm, which shows you who is already sending you business and who could send more.

Kite then writes the profile as a short document. Here's an example of what it might say for the email marketing company:

• Who the firm serves. Online stores selling between one and twenty million dollars a year, mostly on Shopify.
• What the firm does for them. Builds or runs the store's marketing, including email, so the firm's clients need a tool like yours as part of the job.
• Why the firm would recommend you. It earns a referral fee or resale margin, or it saves its team setup time on every new client.
• What rules a firm out. It sells its own email tool, it already resells a direct competitor exclusively, or it has fewer than five active clients.

You read the profile and change it. You might know something Kite doesn't, such as a partner type that never worked for you or a region you want to avoid. Once you agree on it, Kite saves the profile in your team's knowledge base, and every list it builds afterward uses it.

A good channel partner for a B2B startup is a firm whose clients already need your product, who earns something real by recommending it, and who doesn't sell a competing product. Size matters much less than those three things. A twelve-person agency whose clients all need what you sell will usually do more for you than a large consultancy that might mention you once a year.

Kite checks for each of these when it builds your profile and when it researches a firm:

• Client overlap. The firm's clients look like your best customers in industry, size, and the problem they need solved.
• A natural moment to recommend you. There's a point in the firm's work, such as setting up a client's tools or running a project, where your product fits in without extra effort.
• A reason to care. The firm earns a margin, a referral fee, or a better result for its clients when it recommends you. Kite uses the program terms you've recorded in your knowledge base rather than inventing any.
• No conflict. The firm doesn't build or exclusively resell a product that competes with yours.
• Room to grow with you. The firm has enough active clients and staff to bring you more than one deal.

Early-stage companies often do best with smaller firms first. A smaller agency answers its email, gives you honest feedback on your partner offer, and can become a case study you use to recruit the next ten partners.

To build a list of agencies or consultancies that could resell your product, start from where those firms leave public traces, then filter by the profile. Agencies and consultancies show up in partner directories of the tools they use, in the client case studies on their own websites, and in their job postings. Kite searches all three, alongside its built-in company search.

Kite uses several sources at once to find candidates:

• Company search. Kite searches by business category, size, and location, and can filter further by headcount growth or other available criteria. It can also find firms similar to partners you already have.
• Web research. Kite searches the web for agencies and consultancies that serve your buyers, including the partner directories of tools your customers use, industry roundups, and firms that publish case studies about clients like yours.
• Company news. Kite looks for recent events that make a firm more likely to say yes, such as a new partnership announcement, an expansion into your buyers' industry, or a job posting for someone with skills in your category.
• Technology use. Kite can see which products a firm uses or works with, which helps it find firms that already serve customers on the same tools as yours.

Suppose you sell a scheduling product for dental clinics. Kite might find dental marketing agencies, practice-management consultancies, and IT providers that specialize in healthcare offices. It would favor the ones that list dental clients in their case studies and recently posted a job for someone to run client operations.

If you already have a list of firms you want to look at, share it with Kite as a spreadsheet, a list of website addresses, or a message, and it will start with the research.

Research each potential reseller by reading what it says about its own business: who its clients are, what it sells them, which products it already partners with, and whether anything competes with you. Kite does this for every firm on the list before you decide who to contact, because a firm that looks right from its category and size often turns out to be wrong once you read its website.

For each firm, Kite reads the homepage, services pages, client list, and case studies to see who the firm works for and what it delivers. It checks the firm's partner or technology page to see which products it already recommends. It looks for recent news, such as new clients, a funding round, or a leadership change. It also detects the marketing and analytics products the firm's own website uses, which can hint at what the firm knows how to set up for clients.

Kite then writes a short research note for each firm, with sources. The note says what the firm does, how well its clients match yours, what kind of partnership would suit it, and anything that should give you pause. Sometimes the research removes a firm from the list. An agency might already resell a direct competitor, or a consultancy might have shifted away from the clients you serve. Kite tells you when that happens and why.

Kite can also find the person at each firm who would decide on a partnership, such as the founder, a head of partnerships, or the person who runs client services. It searches public professional profiles by title and company and adds a professional email address when its sources have one.

Kite scores each firm from one to five against your ideal partner profile and explains every score, so you can see at a glance which firms deserve your time first. A five is a firm whose clients closely match yours, that has a clear reason to recommend you, and that shows no conflict. A one is a firm that failed one of the rules you agreed on.

For a longer list, Kite splits the firms into a first group to approach now and a second group to revisit later. That keeps your first round of outreach small enough to follow up properly, and it shows you which kind of firm responds before you contact the rest.

Kite saves the list where your team works. It can create the firms and contacts as records in HubSpot or Salesforce, or put the list in a Google Sheet with the score, the reason, and the research note for each firm. When you're ready to reach out, Kite uses the research to write each firm a personal first email and follow-ups. The page on writing partnership outreach emails explains that part of the work.