Managing partner KPIs: Fueling growth in a franchise network

Wojciech Zarębski August 19, 2025

The landscape of business is evolving, and network sales models are at the forefront of this transformation. From franchises and joint ventures to affiliate partnerships, more and more companies are leveraging external collaborations to expand their reach, tap into new markets, and ultimately, boost sales. But with this growth comes an important question: how do you effectively monitor the performance of these diverse channels at scale?

While managing a small network manually might be feasible, scaling up presents a significant challenge. This is where a robust Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform becomes not just helpful, but essential. A PRM empowers you to effectively track partner performance, identify areas for improvement, and make timely adjustments – all from a centralized hub.

With a platform like PowerPRM, you gain the ability to monitor relevant partner performance KPIs and take action directly within the platform. Let’s dive into how you can effectively measure and manage your partner network’s success.

How to measure partner performance?

Continuous progress monitoring is crucial for the effective operation of any business. In a dynamic partner network, this becomes even more complex due to the multitude of moving parts. Each partner will have unique results and strategies, influenced by factors like size, location, and other aspects. Yet, gathering granular insights into each branch’s performance is essential for the optimal functioning of your entire organization.

Well-structured goal definition and continuous assessment are key to fostering strong, productive partner relationships. When you build a strategy together, you lay the foundation for shared success. By keeping an eye on individual partner performance, you can proactively intervene when things deviate from the plan. Additionally, by comparing top performers, you can pinpoint successful strategies and share those insights across your network, boosting collective growth.

To set the right goals, you need the right data and a clear strategy. A well-structured process allows you to not only review past performance but also predict future trends. You can go even further with AI capabilities, gaining intelligent recommendations for action and uncovering hidden patterns through advanced analysis. These features allow you to go beyond tracking to anticipating and optimizing.

Key metrics for partnership success

What metrics should you be focusing on to assess the health of your partner ecosystem? Here are some crucial KPI categories.

Sales-related results

These are often the most direct indicators of your partnerships’ financial impact. You can connect your CRM data to PowerPRM to monitor sales performance. Or, to view partnership-related metrics only, you can track data such as:

Deals: total sales opportunities generated by each partner.
Sales pipeline value: the total value of all active deals in a partner’s pipeline.
Cost of partner acquisition: the cost incurred to acquire a new partner for the organization.
Time to deal: the average duration to generate a sales opportunity.
Revenue over time: with sales data derived from other systems, you can easily build reports to analyze and monitor partner growth over time.

In addition to real-time figures, tracking the growth of these values over time is crucial. Long-term measurement helps you identify patterns like seasonality or flag any anomalies in your results.

Partner satisfaction

Happy partners are key to a successful partnership. KPIs related to partner happiness help you assess satisfaction levels and identify outliers – both those needing improvement and those excelling.

Consider tracking

Net Promoter Score (NPS): a widely used metric to gauge loyalty and satisfaction that can help assess your partnership quality.
Partner satisfaction: measures how satisfied partners are with a specific feature or tool.
Joint project value: can also indicate partner satisfaction in financial terms, as happy partners tend to be more proactive in taking advantage of shared initiatives

Operational performance

While financial health tells a significant part of the story, operational metrics provide deeper insights into how well partners are leveraging your support and adhering to processes. Employee satisfaction within partner branches is also a vital, often overlooked, aspect.

Relevant operational KPIs can include:

Granted incentives value: indicate engagement with your promotional initiatives.
Inventory turnover: shows how effectively your partner sells your products.
Employee satisfaction/turnover: crucial for sustained performance.
Number of support issues raised: can highlight areas where partners might need more assistance.

Compliance and standardization

An important part of managing franchise and business partnerships is maintaining consistency with the organization’s standards. With PowerPRM, you can easily make sure that your partners are leveraging the resources you share with them and meeting your expectations.

Example KPIs to monitor here can include:

Training sessions completed: show engagement with your enablement programs.
Sales or marketing collateral used: indicate adoption of your provided resources.
Audit/assessment scores: allow for assessing compliance over time.
Time to implementation: enables you to monitor timely engagement with initiatives or projects.

Common KPI pitfalls to avoid

Well-defined KPIs are powerful tools, but only if used correctly. Here are some common mistakes to watch out for.

Not involving your partner in setting KPIs

Your franchisees should be more than just executors of the business plan. They are your eyes on the ground, operating in a specific setting. They can bring valuable insights that can inform your KPIs and objectives, ensuring they are achievable and aligned with the overall goal.

The key to partnership is cooperation. Involving your franchise partners in setting realistic goals will strengthen their involvement and sense of ownership, meaning that achieving their KPIs will be something to strive for, and not just another item on a to-do lis

Setting too many goals

In the age of data abundance, it’s tempting to measure everything. However, this often leads to data noise, making it difficult to discern what’s truly important. It consumes valuable time and effort without necessarily yielding meaningful results.

Instead, focus on a few mission-critical metrics that truly reflect partner performance. Once you’re effectively tracking these and deriving value, you can gradually add more. However, you should always keep your core objectives front and center.

Paying attention to vanity metrics

Not all data points offer actionable insights. While metrics like partner portal logins, clicks, or time spent can indicate activity, they don’t always reflect genuine engagement or business impact.

Prioritize actionable metrics such as daily active users, resources downloaded, or specific actions taken in the portal. These provide a much clearer picture of how your partners are interacting with your resources. This way you will track information that is usable.

Never updating KPIs

KPIs are dynamic and should always align with your evolving business strategy. If your plans change or if your current KPIs no longer accurately reflect progress toward your objectives, it’s time for an update.

Regularly review your goals to ensure they continue to support your organization’s overarching objectives. For instance, if your focus shifts from retaining existing customers to acquiring new ones, your KPIs should reflect that change, e.g. by changing from monitoring the percentage of returning customers to the percentage of new ones.

How does PowerPRM help with KPI monitoring?

PowerPRM simplifies the complex task of monitoring partner performance. The platform can be connected to various domain systems to gather partner data. Based on the data you collect, you can define relevant KPIs that are easy to analyze and optimize. The platform also allows you to create custom reports based on your chosen criteria. This unified view provides actionable insights that empower you to optimize partner operations.

The strongest part of PowerPRM is that all data regarding your network’s functioning is available in one centralized location. With multiple data connectors, it’s easy to monitor key performance indicators related to efficiency and goal achievement across your entire partner network.

Working with KPIs in PowerPRM

In PowerPRM, KPIs are intuitively managed using Tiles, accessible in the Back Office view. You can define them using over 100 predefined parameters. This flexibility allows you to set up diverse goals, such as:

Finances – number of deals, deal value, incentive value
Joint initiatives – projects taken part in, incentives used, deals gained from incentives
Performance – number of employees, number of tasks, time spent on tasks
Upskilling – training or courses completed or to be completed
Onboarding progress – resources accessed

You can assign KPIs at the organizational level or even for individual employees within a partner’s team. Further customization, like adding icons, enhances clarity of the goal.

How to set up KPIs in PowerPRM?

Defining goals in PowerPRM is simple. The process allows you to configure the objectives as needed and modify them as necessary.

Select your goal parameter
Specify the value range and minimum target value
Specify the desired color guide for the values (e.g. green for good performance, red for areas needing attention).

An example KPI definition in PowerPRM

You can then view the set KPIs in the partner view of the Back Office portal.

An example KPI Tile in the Back Office portal

A green status might indicate costs well within limits, while a red indicator could signal poor performance, like an estimated deal value of zero.

An example KPI Tile in the Back Office portal

These simple visual cues help you quickly view your partners’ individual results and immediately know whether to advise them to take action or stay the course.

Build effective partnerships with well-defined goals

With PowerPRM, you can manage your partners’ performance with unprecedented effectiveness. The platform makes it easy to define and measure goals in real-time. Built-in file sharing and communication tools streamline the process of sharing assets that help partners achieve their objectives.

For in-person support, the audit planning module allows you to easily plan site visits. You can also leverage the platform to schedule additional training sessions or send surveys to identify specific partner needs.

Ready to explore how PowerPRM can transform goal management and performance monitoring within your organization? Contact us today. We’ll help you implement the platform in line with your needs to support your partners and empower you to achieve your shared objectives.

Managing partner KPIs: Fueling growth in a franchise network

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