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How an Agency and a SaaS Can Become Each Other's Distribution Channel

September 14, 20266 min read

Short answer: a SaaS product and an agency in a completely unrelated category can become each other's distribution channel by swapping the customers neither one was ever going to keep. The SaaS's outgrowing users become the agency's upsell; the agency's too-small leads become the SaaS's downsell. Nobody gives away a customer they could have kept — that's exactly why the arrangement survives contact with the person who owns the P&L.

A company running a service much like ours sent over their entire concierge client list so we could work out which of them we could help. Going down that list on stream produced one mechanism worth writing down properly: two companies that look completely unrelated, swapping the customers neither of them was ever going to keep.

Why I still do this by hand

Ordana automates most of this, and I still sit and do it manually for a set of clients. That is deliberate. Being on the front line — chatting to these people, recruiting collaborators for them, sitting in the conversations — is how I learn what questions are worth asking, what the steps actually are, and which parts of the process are worth building into the product. You cannot design the tool from a dashboard.

So when a partner sends over their whole client list, I read all of it.

Company one: an accounting agency, on a platform full of SaaS

The first name on the list was an accounting agency. Compliance, business structures, tax planning, bookkeeping.

Ordana is mostly SaaS startups. So the immediate reaction is that there is nothing here — an accounting firm and a platform of software companies have no obvious surface to integrate on.

But we do have a lot of SaaS in finance, and plenty of it touches accounting. So the real question is narrower and much more useful: how would a SaaS business benefit from partnering with an accounting agency?

The upsell and downsell swap

Here is the shape that came out of it.

Take an accounting SaaS — a product small businesses use to do their own books. Its users are, by definition, at the stage where software is enough. Some of them will not stay there. A business that keeps growing eventually hits the point where it needs an actual accountant: someone to sign things, structure things, and take responsibility for them.

That customer is leaving the SaaS either way. The only question is whether they leave to a firm that pays for the referral.

So the agency becomes the SaaS's upsell, and in the process the SaaS becomes a distribution channel for the agency — a stream of businesses arriving exactly at the moment they are ready to buy professional services, pre-qualified by the fact that they have been running their own books until now.

Now run it the other way. The agency has its own inbound: leads from its site, referrals, ads. A meaningful share of those leads cannot afford the agency. Not because they are bad businesses — they are simply too early, and full-service accounting is not priced for them.

Today those leads are a polite no. In the partnership, the SaaS becomes the agency's downsell. The lead gets a product that fits their stage, the agency still monetises the enquiry instead of writing it off, and the customer is now sitting inside the SaaS growing towards the day when they will be an upsell again.

Each company becomes the other's channel. Nobody is giving away a customer they could have kept — that is the whole reason it works, and it is why this shape survives a conversation with the person who owns the P&L.

The second firm, and the signal I nearly missed

Further down the list was another accounting firm, and I was ready to reject it for the same reasons as the first — right up until I read their services.

Accounting. Executive advisory. Software implementation.

That last one changes everything. An accounting agency doing software implementation is not an accounting agency to me; it is a firm whose job is putting other people's software into businesses and getting them running on it. They already do integrations. They already have opinions about which tools they recommend. They almost certainly already have partnerships, or want them.

That firm went straight onto the shortlist, and the reason is worth generalising: a services business that already implements software is already an integration partner — it just does not describe itself that way. The signal is buried in a services list, not in a partnerships page.

What to do on Monday

If you run a SaaS and you want partners who are not competitors:

  1. Find the exit your users take. Look at churn from the top of your customer base — the accounts that outgrew you rather than gave up. Whatever they left for is your upsell partner, and they should be paying you for it.
  2. Find the leads you turn away. Every enquiry you decline for being too small is a downsell partner's ideal customer. That is your side of the trade, and it costs you nothing you were keeping.
  3. Read services pages, not partnership pages. A firm that lists "software implementation", "systems setup" or "onboarding" among its services already integrates other people's tools for a living. Approach those first.
  4. Write the swap down as two sentences before you pitch it. "Their users outgrow them and need us. Our leads can't afford us and need them." If you cannot write both directions, it is a referral agreement, not a partnership, and it will quietly stop after a month.

The unglamorous version of this work is exactly what it looks like: a list, a browser, and one judgement call per name. It is also where the good ones come from — the same shortlist process behind finding integration partners at 300 users, just run on someone else's client list instead of your own signup data.

Ordana finds and recruits partners like this for SaaS startups, and structures the revenue share once both sides say yes.

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