Do you need a PRM? A five-question test for partner programs under 200 people
In 2020 a founder on Indie Hackers asked whether he should buy affiliate software. He had one partner, an accountant. The replies were sensible: buy the cheapest thing with the features you need, and pick it for the long term, because "Changing services after starting can be a nightmare."
That's the whole decision in miniature. Most companies under 200 people do not need a PRM. Some of them do, and they usually find out by paying a partner late. The five questions below are how to tell which you are, and the reviews from people who bought the big tools too early are why the question is worth asking first.
PRM stands for partner relationship management, and the category was built for companies with a partner team, a channel budget, and a six-figure software line. A 2026 survey of 102 partnership professionals found 43% run the program with one to three people, and 12% run it alone. Only 26% use a PRM at all. If you're the one person who inherited the partner program along with two other jobs, you're the majority, not the edge case.
Asking the five questions
How many partners are actually sending you deals? Not signed. Sending. Fewer than five, and you don't need a PRM. You do still owe those five something, and you still have to know who sent what, so use the cheapest thing that keeps the tab: a sheet, or a free tier that is a sheet with a partner portal attached. More than 10, keep reading. The gap between signed and sending is normal, by the way. Vendor benchmarks put healthy 90-day activation at 30 to 40% and say the bottom half of a typical partner list produces almost nothing; those are vendor figures without a published dataset, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a precise number.
Can you name your open partner-driven pipeline right now? The number, by stage, without exporting anything. People who can answer that have a setup that works. People whose honest answer is "I'd have to pull it" are spending hours a month reconstructing something that should be a screen.
When did you last pay a partner late? "Never" means you have very few partners or you're better organized than most. Having to think about it means commission tracking is a job you're doing by hand, and it's costing partner trust in a way partners rarely mention until they leave.
Do you know which partners have gone quiet? Half of most partner lists is dormant. Fine, if you can name the quiet ones and what you've done about it. Less fine if you found out a partner had stopped sending deals when they emailed to ask why their last commission never arrived.
What do partners see when they want to check a deal? "They email me" means every partner-driven deal costs you a message thread, and that scales to roughly 10 partners before it's your whole afternoon.
Reading your answers
Zero or one "yes, that's me." You don't need a PRM. You need one place that says who sent what and what you owe them. The deal registration template does that, and so does SoundGTM's free tier, which is the template with a portal your partners can use. Revisit when a partner asks what they're owed and you have to go look.
Two or three. You've outgrown the sheet but not by enough to justify enterprise software, and this is where the reviews get instructive. A sales manager at a 51-to-200-person company called Impartner "the most expensive tool we looked at" and said the sticker price hid a web designer, marketing help, and months before partners saw anything. An IT admin who otherwise loved it warned back in 2017 that "when the team is of five or less the overhead of the system is a little much." A rep at an 11-to-50-person company described PartnerStack as "intimidating as a small company," and a co-founder on Capterra, happy with the product, still named cost as the downside: "quite expensive compared to some of the other platforms." On G2, reviewers of Salesforce's partner product describe pricing that's "prohibitive for small to medium-sized businesses" and "paying a lot for features you might not even touch." One Indie Hackers member who tested Impact.com for a small program said it "felt like using a fighter jet to deliver mail."
None of those reviewers are saying the tools are bad. Several say the opposite. They're saying the tools are sized for a partner team, and there's no six-figure contract in a one-person program, which is why most vendors ignore it. That gap is what SoundGTM was built for.
Four or five. You're running a real partner program on tools that weren't built for one, and the partners can tell. The cost of not fixing it is the partners who leave without saying why.
Choosing the right size of tool
There's a counter-argument, and it comes from the enterprise vendors: buy small and you'll outgrow it in 12 to 18 months. That's true for some programs, and it's also a PRM vendor arguing for PRMs. The Indie Hackers advice holds either way: pick something you can grow into, because migrating is the painful part.
SoundGTM is partner program management for the one person running the whole program. It's not an enterprise PRM, on purpose. Partners register deals through a portal or a tracked link, you tag the partner on the deal in your CRM, and SoundGTM tracks it from there: stage, risk score, a drafted check-in when it goes quiet (paid tiers), and the commission when it closes.
The trade-off is that it's built for programs with dozens of partners, not thousands. If you need SSO, a dedicated success manager, and a contract, that's the Enterprise tier and a conversation. Everyone else starts free.
Free up to 10 partners and 50 deals, no credit card. Every new account gets 14 days of the Scale tier, then drops to Free; your data stays and nothing is locked.
Click through the demo without signing up: partnertracker.soundgtm.com/demo
Or answer the five questions with a real screen in front of you. Start free.