Revenue Share, Co-Sell, or Embed: Which Partnership Model is Right for your Business?

Revenue Share, Co-Sell, or Embed: Which Partnership Model is Right for your Business?

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Not all partnerships are built the same. A referral arrangement with a complementary software vendor looks nothing like a co-sell motion through AWS Marketplace.

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And neither looks anything like a deep product integration that makes you indivisible from another solution.

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For founders and commercial leaders evaluating partnerships as a growth lever, the choice of model matters. Get it right and you're accessing pre-qualified customers, compressing sales cycles, and building a more defensible position in your market. 

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We asked Stu Kelly, Think & Grow's Managing Director, NAMER, to walk through the core differences between the three main partnership models and how to decide which one is right for your stage and your goals.

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The three models: a practical overview

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Stu frames the three models on a spectrum from lowest effort to highest effort and from broadest distribution to deepest stickiness.

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"In that order, they go from lowest effort to highest effort. Revenue share is optimised for broad distribution and reach. Co-sell is optimised for access to larger deals and greater velocity. Embed is optimised for stickiness and retention." — Stu Kelly

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Understanding what each model is optimised for is the starting point. The right choice of partnership is the one that fits where you are and what you're trying to achieve.

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Revenue share and reseller partnerships: built for distribution

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A revenue share or reseller arrangement is the most accessible entry point into partner-led growth. Your solution is sold or referred by a partner in exchange for a share of revenue. 

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The investment required on both sides is relatively low, which makes it well suited to early-stage experimentation.

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"This is where you're going to kiss a few frogs because you can be more experimental. You want a solid approach for managing partners over time because if production falls below the threshold that makes sense for your business, you need a way to sunset those partnerships and put your investment into the ones with continued upside and strategic value." — Stu Kelly

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The upside of this model is speed and breadth. You can recruit multiple partners in parallel, test what works, and build an ideal partner profile iteratively as your go-to-market and product evolve. 

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The downside is that performance will vary because the investment on both sides is lower, commitment levels are lower too, and some partnerships will fade as market conditions or your product direction change.

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Managing this well means building a clear process for evaluating partner performance, defining what the threshold for continued investment looks like, and being professional about exiting relationships that no longer make commercial sense. 

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As Stu puts it: it's not that either side has done something wrong, you've just evolved past what that partner is positioned to deliver.

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What it's optimised for: broad distribution, faster market entry, lower cost of acquisition, iterative partner development.

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Co-sell: built for velocity and deal size

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Co-sell is a more involved motion. You're jointly selling with your partner; sharing pipeline visibility, investing in mutual enablement, and operating within a shared go-to-market framework. The complexity is higher, but so is the commercial upside.

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"You're literally joint-selling with your partner, which means more investment on both sides: pipeline visibility, enablement, a degree of compromise. The optimisation here is access to larger deals and greater velocity." — Stu Kelly

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The most significant co-sell opportunity for most growth-stage technology companies today is through the major cloud marketplaces, like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. 

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These platforms are becoming centralised purchasing environments for enterprise buyers who want to consolidate procurement and access best-in-class solutions in a single place.

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For founders who haven't yet engaged with these platforms as a co-sell channel, Stu is direct about the stakes: how you align and execute within those environments needs to be a core part of your strategy, not a future consideration.

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One of the most common reasons co-sell relationships underperform isn’t for lack of intent, but a lack of clarity on how to operate within them.

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"Our experience is that co-sell relationships are underutilised because the playbook often isn't clear. There's a real benefit to hiring someone into your business who has been there and made it work before. That experience is invaluable." — Stu Kelly

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What it's optimised for: larger deal sizes, shorter sales cycles, access to enterprise buyers through hyperscaler ecosystems, improved win rates through shared pipeline.

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Embed partnerships: built for retention

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An embed partnership is the highest-effort model and the highest-reward one. You're integrating directly with another solution — connected by API, creating a combined value proposition — to the point where your product becomes part of what the customer has bought, rather than a separate purchasing decision.

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The commercial logic is compelling. When your product is embedded in another solution, attachment rates improve, renewal conversations change, and churn becomes structurally harder for the customer to execute.

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"You're essentially indivisible from another solution. Optimised for stickiness and retention, with high net retention driving improved margins and lifetime value over the life of the customer." — Stu Kelly

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Stu's example is instructive: a fraud detection engine embedded into a payment solution. The payment provider didn't build the fraud detection capability, they co-created the need for it. But when the customer comes to renew their payment subscription, removing the fraud detection layer isn't a real option. The vendor is simply carried through.

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Stripe is the most scaled version of this model in practice. For many SaaS businesses building payment functionality, Stripe is  the default. That's what deep ecosystem embedding achieves at scale.

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The embed model requires genuine product alignment between partners, executive buy-in on both sides, and a shared view of the customer outcome you're building towards. 

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Stu's approach is to start from the customer and work backwards: who else is in the technology stack your ideal customer relies on, and what can you build together that's more valuable than what either side offers alone?

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What it's optimised for: retention, net revenue retention, lifetime value, reduced churn, competitive defensibility.

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How to choose

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The right model depends on three things: your stage, your commercial objectives, and how much your organisation is genuinely prepared to invest in the partnership.

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Revenue share makes sense when you're building out your partner ecosystem for the first time, testing which partner profiles convert, or entering a new market where you need distribution quickly without a significant upfront commitment.

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Co-sell makes sense when you have a clear ideal customer profile (ICP), a product ready for enterprise deals, and the internal resource to enable and manage a joint sales motion, particularly if your target customers are already purchasing through cloud marketplaces.

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Embed makes sense when you have strong product-market fit, a defined technology stack your customers operate within, and the appetite for a longer-term investment in a partnership that could fundamentally change your retention metrics.

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None of these models is a set-and-forget. The measurement discipline that keeps partnerships performing, like tracking input and output metrics, reviewing at a regular cadence, and maintaining strategic alignment at the leadership level, applies across all three models, regardless of which you choose.

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Which partnership model fits your growth stage?

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The Think & Grow team works with growth-stage technology companies across NAMER, Australia, and the UK to design and activate partnership strategies that drive measurable commercial outcomes.

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Get in touch to find out more.

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