Partner roles & permissions
Partner team members each hold one of four roles that determine what they can see and do in the partner portal. This article describes each role and explains how roles combine with your partner program settings.
Roles let you comply with the principle of least privilege: a partner's sales rep can work on leads and deals without seeing the commissions their company earns, and an executive sponsor can follow the business without being able to change anything.
Roles apply to partner team members only. Roles for your own partnership team are described in User roles & permissions.
The four roles
Every partner team member has exactly one role at any time. A partner can have several team members with the same role, including several Managers.
Manager
Access everything available to the partner: pipeline, content, rewards, payouts, business plans, Account Mapping, team member management, and the partner's account settings.
Examples: the partner's owner, the sales director.
Sales Rep
Work on the pipeline: view and manage leads, deals, customers, tasks, comments, meetings, and Account Mapping collaborations, and view content. Sales Reps cannot see rewards, payouts, or business plans, cannot upload or manage Account Mapping data sources, and cannot reach team member management or the partner's account settings.
Examples: the partner's sales reps working on deals.
Content Reader
View Assets, Help Center, and News only. Everything else is hidden.
Examples: the partner's marketing team members who only need your co-branded material or the IT team accessible technical documentation.
Stakeholder
Read-only access to everything a Manager can see, except team member management and the partner's account settings. Stakeholders cannot create, edit, or delete anything.
Examples: the partner's CEO.
Whatever their role, partners can never validate deals or create customers and transactions. Those actions remain yours.
Roles work together with your program settings
A role never grants more than your partner program allows. A team member's access is what their program settings enable, narrowed down by their role. If a program setting is off, nobody at that partner gets the functionality, whatever their role. If a setting is on, only the roles it applies to get it.
On a program's Settings tab, each setting shows the roles it applies to, so you can see the effect of a change before you make it:
Account Mapping
Inside the Account Mapping module, only Managers can add and manage data sources. Sales Reps and Stakeholders work with the overlaps and collaborations that result from them.
Roles and the Main contact
The Main contact flag is separate from the role. It decides one thing. Completing the partner's onboarding requires being both the Main contact and a Manager. A Manager who is not the Main contact cannot complete onboarding, and a Main contact who is not a Manager cannot either.
Tips
If you demote your Main contact below Manager, make sure another team member is both, or the partner will not be able to move through onboarding.
What each role sees in the partner portal
Sections and actions a role does not have access to are hidden, so a team member never sees an option they cannot use. The Leads, Deals, Rewards, Payouts, Business Plan, Assets, Help Center, Links, and Tasks items in the partner portal's top menu appear only for the roles that can use them.
What happened to your existing team members
Backward compatibility
Partner roles were introduced on August 9th, 2026. Permissions for existing partners have been changed automatically following the rule below.
When roles were introduced, existing partner team members were assigned a role automatically:
- Each partner's Main contact became a Manager and keeps the same access as before.
- All other team members became a Sales Rep, so they lost access to business plans, rewards, and payouts.
Review your partners' team members and adjust the roles that do not match what you want. Changing a role takes effect the next time the team member loads a page.