Signing a deal with a partner feels great, but it doesn't bring in revenue: the business comes (or doesn't) later, during activation. In this episode of Entre Directores Comerciales (in Spanish), Cyrille Torres, the partnerships expert who has helped Papernest grow in Spain, explains why so many deals never get off the paper and how to decide which ones are worth investing in.
Signing is not activating
Some companies have turned the number of signed deals into a KPI and forget what really matters: getting them activated and making an impact on the business. Torres knows this well at Papernest, a service that handles your electricity, gas or internet contracts when you move home, operating in Spain, France and Italy. In Spain they have signed a huge number of deals in recent years, and not all of them have been activated.
According to Torres, friction rarely comes at the signing stage: once the deal is signed, the person across the table wants the same thing you do. Problems arise if service quality drops or the offer isn't presented to the end customer as agreed. Meetings lead nowhere and frustration builds until someone wants to walk away. Other times, the deal simply never gets started.
Partner activation: proactivity and timing
With experience, Torres says, you learn to sense which deals will generate revenue and which are less likely to. A big factor is how proactively the partner offers your service. The banks they work with promote it inside their app, at the right moment, and that works very well. On a marketplace or in an employee perks catalog, by contrast, you're one option among many: the deal gets signed and even activated, but barely makes money.
The other factor is timing. If there's already a launch date two weeks after signing, everyone is focused on the deal. If it gets delayed, people change, company goals change and the deal slips out of sight.
With experience, you gradually learn which kinds of deals to prioritize, because you know they're 90% sure to generate revenue, and which ones you'll keep an eye on, because you know they're less likely to work.
A perfect deal that generated nothing
The best example is a failure. At the end of 2024, after months of negotiation, Papernest signed a deal with a very large partner that was supposed to take them above their business plan. The negotiation was flawless, but internally they gave it a 50% chance. It went badly: Papernest was betting on proactively offering the service, the partner on data and digital marketing, and their visions drifted apart.
Even so, Torres found value in it. The case has become an internal example of everything that can be avoided during activation. And because the partner is so well known, the signed deal has given them visibility with other prospects. They recently got back in touch to try again.
Prioritizing partners with the whole team's experience
Torres admits that a deal's success doesn't depend on his side alone, but his judgment draws on other deals and on his 12-person team, from acquisition to account managers and coordinators. Each sees the partner from a different angle and knowledge is built collectively: that's why communication is key.
He warns junior hires that they'll go through every stage: meetings that fall through, first deals celebrated loudly and, later, the awkward question of how much they actually generated. His advice: ask your colleagues whether a deal is worth pursuing.
Sign a lot or activate well
What Torres has most had to unlearn is the obsession with signing, which many companies encourage: in his example, out of 100 signed deals you know only 50 will be activated and 40 will generate revenue. Today he looks for a balance between signing a lot and accepting that loss, and signing fewer deals with a higher activation rate.
Where that balance lies depends on the company's stage and on the team: account managers need accounts to retain, while a pure sales team tends to sign and launch nonstop.
Do we prefer to sign, sign, sign and accept a loss between the deal and its activation, or sign fewer deals but get a better return, a higher activation rate? What I've learned is to find a middle ground.
