Why most SaaS founders get business development wrong

Different people, different approaches, real money spent, real time lost. Each time, the early signals looked promising. Each time, the pipeline eventually went quiet. The attempt that finally worked generated couple of millions in partner-driven ARR within three years and became the primary engine of our international growth – accounting for more than half of new revenue across 30+ markets.

The failure patterns, it turned out, were the same every time. And they’re the same across B2B SaaS regardless of what you sell – food tech, HR tech, fintech.

Here’s what they look like up close.

Mistake 1: You don’t have a working framework for what BD actually is

Ask ten SaaS founders what Business Development means, and you’ll get ten different answers: “affiliate marketing”, “warm intros”, “channel sales”, “enterprise partnerships”, “resellers” and so on. None of these is wrong exactly, but without a working framework, you can’t build a system. It’s just doing things you read about in a marketing schoolbook or heard at some course.

A useful way to think about it is as follows. BD operates across three distinct categories, each with different economics and different operational requirements.

Technological partnerships expand your product’s capabilities through integrations. Instead of building every feature internally, you connect with complementary platforms and introduce functionality your customers need without having to develop it from scratch. These integrations can extend what your product can do, allowing you to offer new capabilities while keeping development costs under control. The combined solution solves more problems for the customer, which increases contract value and strengthens retention – once several systems are connected, switching becomes a significantly more complex operational process.

Service partnerships close the gap between what your platform can technically do and what customers achieve with it. In martech, for example, this often means partnering with marketing agencies that specialise in your tool: they help run campaigns, configure the platform and adapt strategies to local markets. Instead of building operational teams in every country, you rely on partners who understand the local business environment and can manage execution for clients. This improves outcomes while allowing the SaaS company to scale internationally without increasing headcount in proportion. In SaaS, a customer who underuses a product is far more likely to churn – service partners help prevent exactly that.

Sales partnerships use external distribution to grow revenue. Someone else’s sales team sells your product through their existing channels. The economics can be extraordinary, but this is also where most founders run into trouble, because sales partnerships are the most complex to execute and the easiest to confuse with something simpler.

Most founders skip straight to sales partnerships and wonder why nothing converts.

Mistake 2: You’re choosing the wrong partner type

Within sales partnerships, there are two fundamentally different categories. The first is what you might call a dedicated dealer – an individual or small firm that wants to represent your product in a specific region or market. They approach you with enthusiasm. Often, they come from your existing network: a former colleague, someone who discovered your product and sees an opportunity, or occasionally, someone’s cousin who ‘knows everyone’ in Warsaw or any other city that matters to your business.

The appeal is obvious: low cost to spin up, a motivated individual, a clear geographic focus, and the emotional satisfaction of feeling like you’re building something together.

The problems are consistent across almost every company that tries this model. These partners are building from zero – they have no existing customer base relevant to your ICP, just personal contacts from previous lives. They call you to demand exclusivity almost immediately: “I’m investing in your brand, I need protection”. They start pulling at your product roadmap: “We can’t sell this in Germany without these five local features”. And because their entire livelihood depends on your product succeeding, every conversation becomes a negotiation about control.

We seeded dealers across Europe. We learned this lesson the hard way, including the specific lesson that without a contract from day one, even friendly arrangements can turn into expensive disputes. We had partners selling our product at prices ten times below what they should have been, paying us nothing. Friendly people, but genuine chaos.

The second category is what works at scale: companies that already own an audience of your exact customers. Your customers don’t buy in isolation – they make purchases in sequences, acquiring certain tools before they even consider acquiring yours. For example, in the restaurant industry, every operator buys a point-of-sale system before they think about a marketing platform. The POS vendor already has the relationship, the trust, and the established sales process with the exact customer we wanted to reach. The same logic applies in every vertical: there’s always a product your customer buys before they buy yours, and the company selling that product is your most natural partner.

These ‘audience owners’ come with built-in advantages that no individual dealer can replicate: an existing customer base that matches your ICP, trained sales teams, market credibility, and a CAC that approaches zero. One partnership activation – a webinar, a newsletter, a bundle offer – can reach hundreds of potential customers simultaneously.

Cold outbound tries to achieve this account-by-account.

Mistake 3: You think the signed contract is the finish line

One of the clearest things we ever articulated internally: a signed partnership agreement means nothing.

Harsh? For sure. Accurate? 100%. We have a graveyard of signed contracts with companies that never generated a single deal. The signing felt like momentum, while all that time it was just paperwork.

We now typically don’t formalise agreements until either the first sale has happened or one is clearly imminent. The contract should document something real, not create the illusion that something real has started.

What needs to happen after the handshake is an entirely different sales process – one most founders never run. You need to understand how sales operate inside your partner’s organisation. Some teams split their salespeople into hunters – those focused on bringing in new clients – and farmers, who work on growing revenue from existing ones. These are often people with different incentives and different conversations, and your product needs to land with the right team at the right moment in their cycle.

More importantly, the executive who signed your agreement is not the person who will generate your revenue – their sales reps are. And those reps have quotas, priorities, competing products to recommend, and almost no inherent reason to care about yours.

The real sale – the one that actually produces pipeline – is selling your product’s value to individual reps inside your partner’s organisation. Weekly calls, shared Slack channels, answering objections in real time, and celebrating every win publicly in whatever group chat they use. We run sales scrums with partner reps every one to two weeks. Not status updates or chitchatting about the weather – active pipeline sessions where we work through specific deals together.

Until you’ve done this work, the agreement is a PDF.

Mistake 4: You’re leading with commission percentages

The standard BD pitch goes something like this: “Partner with us, sell our product, earn 20% of the contract value.” Simple and quantifiable, and completely insufficient as a motivator, particularly with audience owners who already have a thriving core business.

A company operating a core restaurant-tech platform with hundreds of restaurant clients isn’t primarily motivated by incremental revenue share on a complementary product. What moves them is the possibility that your product makes their product more compelling. If adding your marketing tools to their core offering means they can win deals they were previously losing – or retain clients who were considering switching – that’s a different conversation entirely.

The shift that made the biggest difference in my experience: we stopped pitching “sell our product and earn a commission” and started pitching “our product helps you sell more of yours.”

Revenue share still matters, but treat it as the hygiene factor, not the headline. When discussing percentages, present them in absolute terms, not relative ones. Twenty% of a higher-value deal is different from twenty per cent of a cheaper competitor’s deal. Make sure your partner sees the actual figure.

Mistake 5: Your partner’s reps have no reason to care about you

Partner-led growth has a specific failure mode that’s easy to miss because it looks like partner disengagement. After the deal was signed, a few months passed, and the pipeline was empty. It’s easy to conclude that the partner isn’t motivated or needs to be replaced.

Often, the actual problem is simpler and more avoidable: the partner’s sales reps were never given what they needed to sell effectively.

A rep at a partner organisation faces a real challenge. They have their own product to sell and their own manager asking for updates. You’re asking them to add your product to their pitch – a product they may not fully understand and aren’t sure how to handle objections to. If you haven’t made that job frictionless, they’ll default to what they know (and that you don’t control).

What frictionless looks like in practice: ready-to-use sales scripts, a short deck they can use in a meeting, case studies relevant to their specific customer profile, clear FAQ documents for the objections they’ll encounter, and a direct line to someone on your team when a deal gets complicated. Regular co-marketing to keep generating warm leads into their pipeline so they’re not starting from zero. And never ignore public recognition when they close something – even a message in a shared channel acknowledging a win matter more than founders typically expect.

One person can manage this infrastructure across ten or fifteen partners simultaneously if it’s built properly. The work front-loads heavily, then becomes maintenance. The founders who skip it spend the same energy constantly reactivating dead partnerships instead.

The principal underneath all of this: a partner’s sales rep is your most important external relationship. Not the CMO who leads strategy, nor the CEO who signed the agreement. It’s the rep who picks up the phone and decides whether your product is worth mentioning today.

For more startup news, check out the other articles on the website, and subscribe to the magazine for free. Listen to The Cereal Entrepreneur podcast for more interviews with entrepreneurs and big-hitters in the startup ecosystem.