Ask the average channel lead what percentage of their partners are certified on the product. The answer is rarely above fifty percent. Often it is lower. And yet all those partners are included in the pipeline reporting, in the tiering statistics and in the stories told to management.
An uncertified partner may sell your product — but they don't demo it well, don't implement it well and can't support customers well. The customer notices. And it costs you.
The hidden costs of low certification
The most visible cost is higher churn among partner customers. But there are also less visible costs: more support escalations from partner customers to your internal support team, longer implementation processes, lower NPS scores for customers onboarded through a partner. All these costs are rarely attributed to the partner channel — but they are real.
On top of that, there is reputational damage that is hard to quantify but real: a poor implementation by a partner is, in the eyes of the end customer, a poor implementation of your product.
Why certification rates stay low
The main reason is simple: certification is not enforced. Partners can simply book revenue without being certified. As long as no minimum requirement is attached to being allowed to implement or to receiving deal registration, partners have no incentive to certify.
The second reason is that certification programmes are often too heavy: multi-day training, outdated material, no recertification requirements. Partners drop out not because they don't want to, but because the threshold is too high for what they get in return.
How to raise the certification rate sustainably
The approach rests on three pillars. First: link certification to concrete benefits — deal registration rights, a higher MDF allowance, a better tier. Second: lower the entry threshold by making the programme modular and starting with a base level that is realistic to achieve. Third: make certification mandatory for the top 10% of your partner portfolio and build out from there.
Organisations that follow this approach report a certification rate of over seventy percent within twelve months — and a measurable drop in partner churn.