Partnership Enquiry Form Template
Separate real partnership proposals from link-swap spam: mutual value, audience, and partnership type asked up front, politely.
We love working with aligned organizations, and we take every serious proposal seriously. Tell us what you have in mind and what winning looks like for both sides.
The fastest way for us to understand who you are.
Every company above a certain visibility receives two kinds of partnership email: the thoughtful proposal from an aligned organization, and the templated "collab?" blast sent to five hundred inboxes that morning. They arrive looking identical. This form is a filter that costs genuine partners two extra minutes and costs spam blasters their whole model, because the questions here cannot be answered by mail merge.
The load-bearing question. "What would success look like for both sides?" is the load-bearing question and the spam filter in one. Template outreach never articulates the other side's win. It cannot, because it does not know who you are. Real partners answer it eagerly, and their answer becomes the agenda of your first call. The website URL is required because thirty seconds on someone's site answers the alignment question better than three paragraphs of theirs, and a required link field means you never have to Google a vague company name. The partnership-type selector sorts proposals into the lanes different people in your org own, and its last option, "something we haven't thought of", keeps the taxonomy from rejecting the novel idea that is occasionally the valuable one. The reach field is optional and example-driven: numbers a partner volunteers beat numbers you demand.
Asked for later, not now. Deck uploads (ask for the deck once mutual interest exists, since unsolicited PDFs are where malware lives and enthusiasm dies), phone fields (partnership conversations start async), and NDAs or partnership-tier menus, which signal bureaucracy before there is anything to protect.
Who filters partners this way. SaaS companies fielding integration and reseller interest, newsletters and podcasts sorting sponsorship from cross-promotion, nonprofits evaluating corporate partners, and creators whose "business email" has become a spam funnel. Each of them gets more inbound than a person can read, and the mutual-value question does the first pass of reading for them.
Rename the lanes, keep the cadence. Rename the partnership lanes to what you do, and if you never sponsor, delete the lane and watch those emails vanish. The weekly-review promise in the ending sets a real cadence; keep it, because partners judge you by whether the promise holds. Filter the responses view by partnership type when reviewing, and export CSV quarterly to see which lanes produce signed deals versus noise. If integration proposals deserve deeper screening, add a logic rule revealing an API-experience question only for that lane. Anyone unwilling to spend two minutes describing mutual value was never going to spend six months building a partnership. The form is the first collaboration.
Frequently asked questions
Will a form like this scare off good partners?
The opposite, usually. Serious partners read structured intake as competence. The people it deters are the ones sending the same proposal to five hundred companies.
Why no pitch-deck upload?
Unsolicited attachments carry risk and rarely add signal at this stage. The mutual-value answer tells you whether to request the deck, which real partners send happily once asked.
How should different partnership types get routed?
Filter the responses view by the type answer, or push submissions through a webhook and branch in your tooling: integrations to product, sponsorships to marketing.
Can we track which partnerships came from this form?
Export the CSV quarterly and match signed partners against submissions. The type and reach columns make a simple but honest sourcing report.