Selling is the visible part of partner work. Support is the actual job, and the structure is built to say so: you share in an account’s subscription while you serve it. Not once at the signature — while you serve it.
That single design choice should reorganise how you spend your week. Whatever gets an account live is worth less than whatever keeps it working.
You’re inside their orbit
Your presence lives in the customer’s orbit. You’re not a ticket queue they have to find — you’re in the room where their business runs, which means a question reaches you where it happens, at the moment it happens.
Use that. It’s the whole advantage you have over a support address, and it’s wasted if you behave like a support address.
The first two weeks decide it
Almost everything that goes wrong with an account was set up wrong in the first fortnight and nobody noticed.
Go back in early — before anything is broken, while it’s still awkwardly new. Watch what they actually set up, because it will not be what you showed them. Fix the thing they got slightly wrong. Show them the one capability they never noticed. This is the single highest-value hour you’ll spend on an account, and it happens before any problem exists.
Check in before they complain
The rhythm that works is unglamorous: a light touch early, then a regular one, then a real conversation when something changes in their business.
An owner who hears from you when nothing is wrong reads it as service. The same owner hearing from you only after something breaks reads it as damage control. Same call, entirely different relationship, decided by which one you make more often.
Teach, don’t do
The tempting move is to fix things for them. It’s faster today and it costs you every week after.
An owner who understands their twin keeps using it. An owner who depends on you for every change stops trying things, and an account that stops growing is one renewal away from being reconsidered. Do it with them on the screen, make them drive the second time, and let them be slightly slower than you would have been.
Say the true thing about limits
You’ll be asked for something that isn’t live. The right answer is what’s true: this is coming, here’s what exists today, here’s how I’d handle it in the meantime.
A partner who oversells a roadmap is the reason an owner feels lied to in month two — and you’re the person standing in front of them in month two. Anything not live carries a Coming label on our own pages for exactly this reason; carry it into the conversation too.
Where a question is genuinely product-side, take it to #training and come back with the real answer. “Let me find out properly” is a stronger answer than a confident guess, and it survives longer.
What good support looks like in practice
- The early visit, before anything is wrong
- Noticing the thing they set up wrong at the start
- Showing the capability they never found
- Answering where the question happened, not in an inbox
- Telling them plainly when something isn’t live
- Being the same person next quarter
Why the structure rewards this
There’s no fee to join, no territory, and no quota — nothing pushes you toward volume. And the support share is paid while you serve, which means depth is the strategy the program is actually built around.
That has a consequence worth internalising: month three matters more here than week one. A small number of accounts genuinely served beats a long list nominally owned, and the relationship is yours — the account sits in your orbit and nobody takes it off you.
The full terms are in your partner agreement, and that’s where they belong. This note is only about the work.
Next, and last: training another partner.