The last three letters gave you numbers: CDE for how fast your ecosystem finds customers, CSI for whether they succeed, ECS for how much of their needs you can meet. Those are ecosystem-level scores. This letter is about the unit underneath them: one partner, one customer, and how much of that customer’s life the partner is actually in.
We use the four-level model from Arwin Scholte’s Four Depths of Partnership [link to Part 2, as amended]. It fits on a napkin and it changes your quarter, so here it is in full.
The rule
A customer’s life with your product has three segments: sell, deploy, run. A partner covers a segment when it does work there that contributes to the customer’s outcome and bills for it, or saves you from carrying the cost.
Depth is how many of the three the partner covers, for that customer.
L1. One segment. Usually sell: referrals, registered leads, pipeline. Sometimes run alone: a partner that inherited the account and keeps it working. One cell filled.
L2. Two segments. Sell and deploy is the common shape: the partner brings the deal and is inside the implementation. Sell and run is the other, and it is more common than most books admit: the accountant who recommends a payments product and then runs it for the client every month, with nobody from the vendor involved after sign-up.
L3. All three. The partner brought the customer, deployed them and is still there, billing, after go-live. This is the level the model is built around, because it is the first one where the partner is in the customer’s success rather than just their acquisition. Last letter’s CSI is how you see it: L3 partners leave fingerprints on the health of their customers.
L4. All three, and then more. A service your product is sold inside, resell, a certified training practice, a global footprint. The extension does not count on its own; a global reseller that sells and deploys but does not run is L2 with an extension, not L4.
The segments are not ordered. Nothing says a partner must sell before it deploys or deploy before it runs. The three columns are the same for every partner; what differs is which cells are filled.
Depth is a count, not a badge
Here is where most partner-tier programmes go wrong: the tier is a field someone sets. Gold, silver, bronze, assigned in an admin screen, reviewed annually, negotiated at renewal. It describes the contract, not the relationship.
Depth, as we compute it, is read off what the partner actually does. Three questions per partner per customer, all of which you already have the data for if you measured the first three letters honestly:
Did the partner sell it? Is the opportunity’s referrer field set to them?
Did the partner deploy it? Were they on the plan, in the meetings, billing for the work?
Does the partner run it? Is there recurring billing after go-live: a managed service, retained time, support seats, a shared channel they staff?
Count the yeses. One, two, three. No committee, no negotiation. When the work changes, the count changes with it, in both directions.
Two consequences of counting instead of assigning. First, it cannot be gamed in a QBR. Second, every level tells you exactly which segment is empty, so the next step is obvious. An L1 with strong pipeline is one deploy engagement away from L2. An L2 that sells and deploys needs a reason to stay after go-live and something to bill for it. An L2 that sells and runs is already in the part of the lifecycle that matters; the question is whether deploy is a segment your product even has. The model is a coaching tool before it is a scoreboard.
Where health fits
Customer health is not a fourth segment and it is not what makes a partner L3. It is the evidence that a covered segment is doing something. A partner that bills for run across a book of customers whose health sits below your median is still L3 by count; the flag beside the count is the conversation. Next letter covers how that flag is computed honestly, because it is the place most tools quietly give up.
The partner that stops at L1 and is right to
Some partners cannot climb, and that is the model working. A referral partner with no services line has nothing to bill for at deploy or run; the count stops at one. Treating them as stuck is the category error. Their job is better routing, not deeper delivery.
So record what each partner is, rather than inferring it from silence: referral, implementation, advisory, managed services. A referral partner at L1 is at its ceiling. A managed-services partner at L1 is a problem. Same number, different meaning, and the only way the model can tell them apart is if you wrote it down.
Why one deeper partner beats ten new logos
Signing ten new partners gives you ten L1s: ten sources of referrals, zero post-sale coverage, and a partner-management workload that grew tenfold. Moving one existing partner from L1 to L3 gives you something none of those ten can: a partner inside the customer’s run segment, which is where retention and expansion live. It shows up in all three letters at once. CDE, because a partner that stays refers better-fitting deals. CSI, because they are working the lifecycle. ECS, because a partner covering run is covering more of the needs register.
Logo counting grows the top of your funnel. Depth grows everything below it.
Try it on your own book
You can run this in a spreadsheet this afternoon. One row per partner per customer, three columns (sell, deploy, run), a yes or no in each, and a fourth column for what the partner bills on a recurring basis. Be strict about the third column: billing, not fondness. Then a fifth column for what the partner is: referral, implementation, advisory, managed services.
Most books come out heavily L1, with one or two L2s that sell and run which nobody had named, and the run column full of partners the customer would mention and your systems do not hold. Then pick one partner with an empty segment it could fill, and spend the quarter you would have spent recruiting on filling it.
If you would rather have the count derived continuously from live pipeline, engagement and billing data, with the empty segment surfaced per relationship, that is what Entwine does. The free workspace monitors five relationships, no credit card:
Start with the needs register. The rest follows from it.
The three-metric letters (CDE, CSI, ECS) plus this one complete the foundation. From here: field notes on running an ecosystem with these numbers on the wall.