How a two-person team manages 250+ partners
How Skio made PartnerPortal the administrative backbone of a 250+ partner program — automating payouts and educating partners while saving ~1.5 full-time employees.
“PartnerPortal.io is key to the infrastructure of our program. Executing payouts would be a whole job in itself if I was doing all this manually.”
About Skio
Skio is a subscription platform for Shopify brands, with over 250 partners and roughly 35 employees. After a comprehensive evaluation of the PRM offerings on the market, Skio signed with PartnerPortal.io in December 2022. Before that, they managed partnerships manually via email and spreadsheets — an approach with distinct limits around paying partners and partner education. We spoke with Nick Belanger, Head of Partnerships at Skio, about those challenges and how they overcame them.
The Problem
The inability to provide economic incentives to partners was a critical issue as Skio worked toward a goal of 20% of pipeline being driven by partners.
We knew that being able to offer economic incentives in the form of revenue share and commissions to our partners was just table stakes. We really had no way to execute payouts. Finding a system to automate that for us was key to kickstart the whole program.
Second, Skio couldn’t give partners the educational content they needed to make informed referrals. As Nick put it, “it’s pretty clear that it’s harder for our partners to make informed and persuasive referrals to us if they’re not educated about everything that we do.” Relying on social media, newsletters, and one-off Slack messages proved cumbersome.
The Solution
Skio adopted PartnerPortal.io as the “administrative backbone” of their partner program, cutting manual work and streamlining partner payouts. Automated revenue sharing reduced errors and delays while increasing partner-driven pipeline.
PartnerPortal.io also became Skio’s “de facto resource center for all partners.” Uploading and sharing resources with custom groups and tiers closed the knowledge gap and empowered partners to make more effective referrals. Ease of use was decisive:
Having a tool that’s really intuitive and easy to use is half the battle. If I have to do a deep dive training session on how to use a tool, partners are not going to engage.
The Results
Implementing PartnerPortal.io saved Skio the equivalent of about 1.5 full-time employees. What used to be a complex, labor-intensive process — compiling exports, chasing payments, and going back and forth with partners — is now “maybe a 10 minute task,” and paying a partner is “one click to pay out.”
Just as striking is the scale a two-person team now runs:
PartnerPortal.io has enabled us to successfully manage 250 plus partners as a two-person team. Partners adopting PartnerPortal.io really took off all the admin work from my shoulders.
Nick’s conclusion: “utilizing PartnerPortal.io was definitely the right decision for our team.”