---
title: "Glossary"
url: https://wave2alliances.com/glossary/
description: "Plain definitions of twenty-four terms used in business alliances and partnerships, from agent and alliance to white label."
---

# Glossary

## Terms

**Agent**: A party that arranges sales on behalf of a principal without taking ownership of the goods. The principal contracts with the end buyer; the agent earns a commission.

**Alliance**: A continuing arrangement in which two or more organisations coordinate work towards an agreed outcome while remaining separately owned and separately run.

**Attribution**: The problem of deciding which party's effort produced a given result when both were involved. Almost every partnership dispute about money is an attribution dispute in disguise.

**Channel conflict**: The friction that arises when a producer sells both through a partner and directly to the same buyers, so the partner is competing with its own supplier.

**Co-branding**: Presenting two identities together on one offering, so that each lends the other some of its standing with buyers.

**Co-marketing**: Joint promotion of separately owned offerings, usually with shared costs and shared audiences but no shared product.

**Consortium**: A group of parties that agree to act together on a defined piece of work, often without creating a separate company. Common where a single contract is too large for one party.

**Deal team**: The people who negotiate an arrangement. They are usually not the people who then have to operate it, which is the source of a great deal of later trouble.

**Distributor**: A party that buys stock, holds it, and resells it on its own account, taking both the margin and the inventory risk.

**Exclusivity**: A promise by one party not to make the same arrangement with others, usually bounded by territory, market segment, product line and time.

**Exit**: The agreed way an arrangement ends: notice periods, what happens to jointly created work, and which obligations continue afterwards.

**Governance**: The standing arrangements for running a partnership after signature: who meets, how often, what they decide, and how a disagreement is escalated.

**Joint venture**: An arrangement in which the parties create a separate vehicle, contribute resources to it, and share what it produces according to agreed proportions.

**Lagging indicator**: A measure that confirms an outcome after it has happened, such as revenue recognised through a partner. Reliable, but too late to steer by.

**Leading indicator**: A measure that moves before the outcome does, such as the number of partner staff trained on a product. Useful for steering, easy to game.

**Margin**: The difference between what a reselling party pays and what it charges. In channel arrangements it is the price of the route to market.

**Memorandum of understanding**: A written statement of shared intent that the parties do not intend to be fully binding. Useful for sequencing talks, dangerous when mistaken for an agreement.

**Platform**: An offering that other parties build on or sell through, where the owner sets the terms of participation for everyone else.

**Referral**: Passing a prospective customer to another party without handling the sale, usually for a fee or in expectation of reciprocity.

**Reseller**: A party that sells another organisation's product to end buyers under its own commercial relationship with those buyers.

**Scope**: The precise description of what the arrangement covers. Loose scope is the single most common defect in a partnership document.

**Sponsor**: The senior person on each side who wanted the arrangement and is accountable for it. When a sponsor leaves, the arrangement usually loses momentum.

**Term**: How long the arrangement runs, whether it renews automatically, and what triggers a review.

**White label**: An arrangement in which one party's product is sold under another party's name, with the producing party invisible to the buyer.

### Related reading

- [What an alliance is](https://wave2alliances.com/what-an-alliance-is/)
- [Forms of partnership](https://wave2alliances.com/forms-of-partnership/)
- [How alliance terms are structured](https://wave2alliances.com/how-alliance-terms-are-structured/)

Terms are listed alphabetically. Each definition is written to stand on its own without the surrounding page.