Partner Performance: Measure What Matters
In this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Chris Messina from QuarkAI in this talk. They discuss how hard it is to measure what partners do. Chris talks about starting QuarkAI to fix this problem of "invisible" partnerships. This episode shows how to look past just leads and money to see the full value partners bring.
Listen to learn how a straightforward way to measure things can change how company leaders see and pay for partner programs.











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Video Podcast: Partner Performance: Measure What Matters

Chapter 1: The Problem: You Can't See What Partners Do


Chris Messina starts by talking about the main problem QuarkAI wants to fix: you can't see what partners do. He says that for 15 years, he built partner programs. They often looked like they failed on paper, even when doing well. It was hard to show his work and prove the value partners added that didn't involve direct sales. He explains that partner teams do many things that don't easily appear in sales numbers. It is hard to get company leaders to trust them and invest more. The challenge is to show all the good things partners do that don't fit into regular reports.
Chris felt this problem strongly. In early 2024, he realized the most significant issue was "nobody believes us". He left his job to solve this problem. At first, he thought about a top-down plan. But then, he saw that AI could help fix the issue from the ground up. The name "QuarkAI" comes from this idea. It means proving value at the smallest level. If they can show value there, they can show all the value that other tools miss. This will help company leaders trust and invest in partner programs.
Chris says partnerships live "inside everybody else's metrics, KPIs, tools". This means partner teams must try to show their value after the fact. Also, since these tools belong to other teams, there's a problem where other teams say, "That's my credit". These tools also set the rules for what success means for those teams. Partner teams don't have their own clear goal. QuarkAI wants to make partnerships visible and create one clear way to measure success that everyone understands. This will give partner leaders the tools to prove their worth and become important company leaders.





Chapter 2: Measuring Partners: Big Companies vs. Small Companies


Chris explains that measuring partners is hard for massive and tiny companies, but in different ways. For big companies that spend billions on partner programs, the problem is knowing what most of their partners are doing. He gives examples: a company with 5,000 partners only knows what 50 are doing. Google has 100,