The money is no longer hesitant. PartnerStack and Wynter surveyed 100 senior B2B SaaS leaders for their State of Partnerships in GTM 2026 report and found that 69 percent plan to increase partnership investment this year, with zero percent planning to cut it. Deals with a partner involved closed faster in 48 percent of cases and ran larger in 23 percent, numbers partner leaders can carry straight into a budget meeting.
The trouble starts the moment someone asks for a clean number. Ask three partner leaders how they calculate partner-sourced revenue and expect three different formulas back. The same survey found multi-touch attribution, crediting every touchpoint across the customer journey, is the most common method at 42 percent, while 31 percent still credit the first touch and 19 percent credit the last. There is no dominant standard, so two companies citing partner-sourced revenue in the same board deck may be measuring entirely different things.
This is an old complaint that years of PRM spending never actually fixed. Crossbeam’s State of the Partner Ecosystem survey found that partnership teams received proper credit for a deal only about 25 percent of the time, even as partner involvement measurably shortened sales cycles and widened deal sizes. Years later, with a far bigger budget behind the function, the three-way attribution split in the newer data suggests the underlying fight, over which system’s dashboard the deal belongs to, was never resolved. It was just spread across more tools.
Forrester frames this as a leadership failure rather than a tooling gap. The firm argues that legacy attribution models were not built to capture the full spectrum of partner impact, and lays out a four-step fix, discover, define, assign, align, that starts with executives deciding what counts as sourced versus influenced before they pick a measurement method, not after one is already running. A company that buys a PRM platform expecting it to settle attribution on its own is solving the problem at the wrong layer.
The practical risk sits in compensation and budget, not in a dashboard. When attribution is inconsistent, so is credit for comp plans, market development fund allocation and next year’s headcount request. It also feeds channel conflict directly: when a reseller, a systems integrator and an internal rep each believe they sourced the same deal, an inconsistent attribution method does not supply an answer, it supplies three competing ones. The 69 percent raising partner spend this year would do well to settle the measurement question now, while the money is still flowing, instead of waiting for a renewal cycle to force it.
Sources referenced in reporting: PartnerStack and Wynter, The State of Partnerships in GTM 2026, Crossbeam, Two Attribution Challenges for Partnership Professionals, Forrester, Partner Attribution Is Broken.