Find the businesses that
already serve your customers.
Partners Network is the referral-partner tool built into UpChannels. It suggests which kinds of local business are worth approaching for your trade, searches Google business listings for them inside a radius you choose, and keeps every one you save as a tracked prospect with a status, a next follow-up date and a running note.
- 1. Plan
Partner types for your trade, each with a reason, an idea, a priority and ready-made search terms
- 2. Search
Real listings near you — name, address, phone, website, Google rating
- 3. Reach Out
An email drafted from your industry template, opened in your own mail app
- 4. Follow Up
Status, priority and a next date for every partner — overdue rows in red
Plan who to approach, find them, write to them, follow up
Referral partnerships are the cheapest customer acquisition a small store has, and the easiest thing to let slide when nobody owns them. Partners Network turns the whole job into four tabs — decide who to approach, find them, write to them, and remember to follow up.
Somebody local already has
the customer you want.
A plumber standing in front of a twelve-year-old water heater that is not worth fixing knows about a replacement sale before you do. A real estate agent closing on a house, a contractor pricing a kitchen, a property manager turning over four units — each of them is holding a buyer who has not started shopping yet. The same is true in reverse: every water heater, sofa or mower you sell is an install or a delivery, and that is work you can hand to somebody who will hand something back.
Owners know this. What they do not have is an afternoon to build a list of forty local businesses, a written email that does not sound like a cold pitch, and a reason to remember on the 14th that they called somebody on the 1st. Partners Network is those three things, sitting in the same app as the sales the partnerships are supposed to produce.
What owners use it for
What each partner-type card tells you
- Why partner — the specific reason their customers become yours
- Partnership idea — a concrete arrangement to propose, not a slogan
- Priority — Very High, High, Medium or Low, so you know where to start
- Expected return and difficulty — how much it tends to be worth against how hard the relationship is to build
- Search terms — the exact phrases that find that kind of business
Click a card and it carries the partner type and its search terms straight into the Search tab, with your location filled in.
You start with a shortlist,
not an empty map.
When your store is set up in UpChannels it is attached to an industry profile — a prebuilt template for HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, furniture, electronics, apparel, liquidation, appliance retail, appliance repair, auto repair, restaurants, beauty services, or a general profile for anything else. Each template carries the partner types that actually work in that trade.
A lawn-care company opens the Plan tab and sees real estate agents and property managers, general contractors and home builders, and garden centers and nurseries. A store on the general profile sees complementary local businesses, real estate agents and property managers, chambers of commerce and community organizations, and event planners and local venues. Nobody has to guess who to call first.
Real businesses,
inside a radius you choose.
Type a city, or press Use Current and let the browser find you and turn the coordinates into a city and state. Pick a radius — 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 25 or 30 miles — keep the search terms that came from the Plan tab or type your own, and search. What comes back is live Google business listings: the business name, its full address, its phone number, its website and its Google rating, with its listed categories underneath.
Twenty results arrive at a time and Load More pulls the next page, up to the sixty results Google returns for one search; duplicates across pages are dropped. Anything you have already saved is marked Added to Reach-Out, so two people at the same store cannot approach the same business twice without knowing.
What comes back on every result
- Business name and full street address
- Phone number, formatted and one click to copy
- Google rating and the categories the business is listed under
- One button to save it as a partner prospect
Google listings almost never include an email address. You add that yourself the first time you write, and it stays on the record.
The template library
- Initial Partnership Inquiry — first contact with a business you have never spoken to
- Follow-up Email — the second message, for the ones who did not answer
- Initial Cold Call — an opening script for picking up the phone instead
- Referral Discussion — a script for the conversation about sending work both ways
Every template uses bracketed placeholders — your name, your store, your city — so it is obvious what to replace before anything goes out.
A first email worth sending,
from your own address.
Reach Out lists the partners you saved and have not written to yet. Pick one and UpChannels drafts an email against the template for that partner type, with the business name and rating already filled in. The real-estate template for a lawn-care company, for example, proposes the specific arrangement: fast pre-listing cleanups for curb appeal, and recurring maintenance on the properties they manage.
Edit the draft, then send it. UpChannels opens it in your own email client rather than mailing on your behalf, so the message arrives from you, lands in your sent folder, and their reply comes back to your inbox. The partner is marked Contacted only once that draft has actually opened — never from clicking a button.
Every partner has a status
and a next date.
One table holds every partner you have saved: business name and type, status, priority, phone number, the next follow-up date and the day you saved them. Rows whose follow-up date has passed turn red, which is the whole point — partnerships die of being forgotten, not of being refused.
Filter by status or priority, or search across names, types, addresses and notes. Open a row and you can correct the business name, type, phone, website and address, move the status, change the priority, set the next follow-up date, and keep a running Progress & Note field — what they said, what you agreed, what you owe them.
The five stages a partner moves through
- Prospect — saved from a search, not yet approached
- Contacted — you have written or called
- Responded — they answered and the conversation is live
- Active Partner — an arrangement is in place
- Inactive — it went quiet, and the record stays so you can try again
Priority is High, Medium or Low, and it is yours to set — a new prospect starts at Medium.
Partners Network sits in Growth, and partner records live in the same database as your customers
In the UpChannels sidebar, Partners Network lives in the Growth section — beside Customers Nurturing, the Communications Hub, SMS Campaigns, Reviews Booster, Ads Insights, Competitors Monitor, Local Vibes and the Loyalty Program. A saved partner is written into the same client database that holds your customers, flagged as a partner record and tagged with the source Partner Discovery. That flag is what keeps partners out of your customer list and out of customer SMS campaigns, while sparing you a second address book in a spreadsheet somebody else cannot open.
It is included in every UpChannels plan — Basic, Pro and Premium — rather than being one of the contact-sales add-ons like Bank Reconciliation or integrated card payments. See the pricing page for what each plan costs.
What Partners Network does not do
- It does not send outreach for you. It writes the draft and hands it to your email client; you press send.
- Partners get no login. These are your private records of your relationships — nothing is published, and nothing is shared between UpChannels stores.
- It does not measure referral revenue automatically. There is no report that says this agent sent you $8,400 — you record what a partner is producing in the notes and read the sales in your own order history.
- Search is capped at a 30-mile radius and roughly sixty results per search. Both are limits of the Google business-listing service behind it, not settings we can raise.
- A shared supply pool — sourcing a unit you do not have from another dealer in the network — is listed inside Procurement as coming soon. It is not shipped, and this page does not claim it.
Partner questions, answered
Can I find local businesses to partner with without buying a lead list?
Does UpChannels send the partnership emails for me?
What kinds of partner does it suggest for my type of business?
How do I keep track of who I contacted and when to follow up?
Can I add a partner I already work with, who did not come from a search?
Can I see how much business a partner has sent me?
Is Partners Network a paid add-on?
Partners Network is one part of UpChannels
UpChannels Partners Network is the referral-partner tool inside the platform small retailers and service businesses run their stores on. It suggests the partner types worth approaching for your trade — repair shops, real estate agents, contractors, designers, complementary local stores — searches Google business listings for them within a radius of up to 30 miles, drafts the first email from an industry template that opens in your own mail app, and tracks every partner through Prospect, Contacted, Responded, Active Partner and Inactive with a priority and a next follow-up date. It is included in the standard subscription rather than sold as an add-on.
UpChannels is an all-in-one platform for small retailers and service businesses — sales, inventory, customers, scheduling, delivery, payments and finance in one system — and a real team that builds your website, runs your ads, and automates the busywork. Every capability below is included in the same subscription, with no integration to wire up between them.
The product moves faster than this page. UpChannels ships updates most weeks, so a description here can lag what is already in the software. Where the two disagree, the running product is the current version — tell us if you find one and we will correct the page.
Ready to upgrade your
retail business management?
Start your free trial today. No credit card required.
One system for the counter, the schedule, the truck and the books — and a team that will build the website, run the ads and take the busywork off you if you would rather not do it yourself. Start with the trial, or have us walk you through it first.
