Technical Affiliate & Partner Marketing Manager

Technical Affiliate & Partner Marketing Manager

Owner of the affiliate acquisition channel and its P&L · B2B SaaS portfolio company (Europe and the Americas) · Remote (Italy), CET ±1

You will build and run affiliate and referral partnerships as an acquisition channel with its own P&L: partner payouts, platform and content costs on one side, qualified traffic, SQL and closed revenue on the other.

The channel does not exist today in a structured form. You build it from the first partner to a programme that pays for itself.

The mandate

• Find the partners who already talk to our buyers: software marketplaces and integration partners, industry consultants and associations, comparison and review sites, newsletters, communities, and creators in the sector (B2B on LinkedIn and YouTube, B2C on Instagram and TikTok where the end customer is reachable).
• Qualify them with data (audience overlap, intent, traffic quality) before anyone signs anything.
• Negotiate and paper the deals: CPA, revenue share, hybrid, flat fee for content, exclusivity, duration, attribution rules, clawbacks. You own the contract template with legal.
• Co-produce content with each partner: comparison pages, tutorials, webinars, creator videos, newsletter placements. You brief, review and approve.
• Track everything: unique links, UTMs, coupon codes, server-to-server postbacks, partner dashboards, fraud and self-referral controls, monthly reconciliation and payouts.

First 90 days

• Day 30: top 50 partner candidates mapped and scored by segment and country; tracking stack live; contract template approved; first 5 agreements signed.
• Day 60: partner content live for at least 10 partners; first SQL attributed in the CRM; payout process run once end to end.
• Day 90: 20 active partners, a published cost per SQL by partner type, and a decision on which two partner types get next quarter's budget.

Stack you should already know

• An affiliate or partner platform (PartnerStack, Impact, Tune, Rewardful, FirstPromoter or equivalent), including S2S postbacks and payout automation.
• End-to-end tracking and attribution: UTMs, GA4, HubSpot or similar CRM, deal-level attribution, dedupe against paid and organic.
• Prospecting tools (Apollo, Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Similarweb or equivalent) to find and qualify partners by audience data.
• Creator and influencer work with real contracts and real tracking, not gifting.

How we measure you (targets set together in month 1)

• Active partners (at least one qualified lead in the month): 20 by day 90; growth target from month 4.
• Affiliate SQL per month and cost per SQL: baseline by month 3; must beat paid media cost per SQL by month 6.
• Closed revenue attributed to partners and payout ratio: monthly; channel margin positive by month 6.
• Partner activation rate (signed to first lead within 60 days): above 50%.
• Fraud and invalid lead rate: below 5% after reconciliation.

Must-have

• 4+ years running an affiliate, partner or referral programme in B2B SaaS where you owned the budget and reported margin, not just leads.
• You have negotiated and signed at least 20 partner or creator agreements and can describe the terms of the three that worked best and the three that did not.
• You have set up tracking yourself at least once (postbacks, dedupe, reconciliation) and can explain how you caught fraud.
• Fluent English. Spanish or Italian is a strong plus for the Southern European partner base.

Not a fit if

• Your affiliate experience is managing a network someone else built, or e-commerce coupon traffic with no sales-qualified step.
• You need an agency to produce the content. You brief and edit; the partner or our designer produces.

Location, contract and compensation

• Remote, based in Italy (within one hour of Central European Time, CET ±1).
• Full-time contractor or local employment through an EOR.
• Fixed compensation plus a variable tied to the channel P&L (margin after media, tools and partner costs), paid quarterly. Ranges are shared in the first call.

How we hire

• 30-minute call to confirm fit and compensation.
• 48-hour technical case built on anonymised real data from the company.
• 60-minute defence with the hiring manager, where we change the conditions live.
• Decision within a week of the defence.

We read the case for one thing: whether you can own a channel P&L and show the number moving. Tool lists and generic benchmarks do not score. Figures that come from the data pack, and something built that runs, do.