What flavor of business development is this page for?
This page targets the strategic partnerships, channel, and complex-deal flavor of business development: long cycles, multi-stakeholder deals across companies, warm-introduction chains, and non-standard commercial structures (co-sell, revenue share, joint venture, OEM resale, strategic investment with a commercial side). It is not the outbound-SDR flavor of BD that some companies call "business development representative", and if that is your motion, the SDR page is the better fit. The two motions overlap in that both work pipelines, but the daily work, the deal shapes, the forecast surface, and the leader scorecards are different enough that treating them as the same role in a CRM leaves both teams underserved.
How does Strkr model a partnership as a distinct object from an account or a deal?
A Partnership record in Strkr is a custom object with its own lifecycle (scoping, pilot, launch, co-sell, renewal, wind-down), its own fields (type, tier, co-sell motion, revenue-share split, legal status, exec sponsor pairing), and its own pipeline. It links to the partner account, to the customer accounts in play, and to the deals it has generated. BD teams model partnerships as first-class relationships rather than overloading the Account object or hiding partnership context in a text field on a deal. The custom object framework is a core Strkr capability, so partnerships, co-sell deals, JV entities, revenue-share agreements, and any other BD-specific shape can be modeled without engineering help.
Does Strkr handle warm-introduction chain tracking and referrer thank-yous?
Yes. Every opportunity record carries an introduction chain field that captures the full path from the first referrer to the decision-maker, including intermediate touchpoints. When the deal closes won, Strkr auto-generates a thank-you task for the person who made the opening introduction, with the full deal context attached. The referrer's contact record accumulates a referral count, and the BD leader can run a top-referrers report to see which long-dormant relationships funded the quarter and which are overdue for a check-in. The long-memory relationship work that funds the next five deals becomes a managed, visible asset instead of a lucky accident that depends on one BD rep's personal notebook.
Can Strkr forecast a BD pipeline that does not fit stage-based probability?
Yes. BD leaders can replace the stage-probability dropdown with signal booleans: partner CEO engaged, legal redline started, exec sponsor confirmed, pilot customer renewed, integration scoped, commercial terms agreed in principle. Strkr weights each signal by its historical correlation to a closed deal in the tenant's own history, so the forecast number reflects the real drivers of a BD deal and the exec forecast call talks about the right conversations rather than debating a false-precision percentage. The signal catalog is tunable per team, so a strategic-partnerships team and a channel team can weight different signals, and the forecast surface treats BD's qualitative data as first-class rather than as noise.
How does Strkr handle revenue-share, co-sell, and JV deal shapes?
The native deal record carries fields for partner, split percentage, primary seller, and attribution rules, so a co-sell deal is a native shape rather than a workaround. For revenue-share arrangements, the record captures term, share percentages by milestone, and measurement windows, with reconciliation events generated as revenue lands. For joint ventures, Strkr lets BD teams create a JV Entity custom object with its own lifecycle and legal-thread history, linked to the deals and partnerships that feed it. The commercial side of a BD deal is finally visible on the CRM record rather than in a side-spreadsheet owned by finance, and the monthly close stops being a treasure hunt through email threads with the partner.
How does the BD-to-AE handoff work when a partnership becomes a direct deal?
When a BD opportunity hits the Commercial Negotiation stage, Strkr routes the deal to the AE based on territory or named-account coverage, with the full history auto-attached: the stakeholder map, the introduction chain, the partnership context, the exec sponsor pairing, and 12 months of logged activity. The AE walks into the first commercial call fully briefed instead of asking the BD rep to re-explain the deal, and the BD rep stays attached as a secondary owner on the account for its lifetime so the relationship context does not disappear once the commercial thread opens. The handoff friction that quietly kills BD deals at the AE border stops costing deals.
How does the BD scorecard differ from the AE scorecard?
A BD scorecard measures the right verbs for a BD motion: exec meetings held, joint planning sessions run, partner-side introductions secured, stakeholder-map refreshes completed, signal-level advances on active deals, exec sponsor touchpoints kept on cadence. Call-count dashboards and dial-count metrics get replaced with ratios that measure relationship capital built per week. The BD leader coaches on the actual BD motion, the BD rep is measured on the work they are actually paid to do, and the direct-sales leader is not surprised when the BD team's activity profile looks nothing like the AE team's. The scorecard is a saved view the BD leader can duplicate and tune per team.