Partner Technical Presales Enablement

In this section of the Partner Programs Handbook we review assets and enablement from the perspective of GitLab Partners’ Technical constituencies.

Beyond our Partners Handbook pages you will find sales guides, use cases, training materials, and program guides reviewed below. Additional partner-specific content is hosted in our GitLab Partner Portal. The materials should be a great place to start effectively selling, serving and hitting your number with GitLab.

Remember that some of the links below require you to login to GitLab’s Partner Portal first. If you haven’t already, here is where you register for portal access.

Presales and Technical Enablement Resources

Foundational Knowledge

GitLab Quick Start for New GitLab.com Customers

  • Provides a great primer on the basics of GitLab.com, Namespaces, Groups, Projects, Members, and the GitLab Customer Portal.

Building Pipelines GitLab Partner Webinar Series (Live Webinar & Episode Content Archive)

  • This webinar series is produced exclusively for GitLab Partners. We discuss various sales and presales-level topics that help you build your sales pipeline with GitLab.
  • Click the link above to view the archive of previous episode content and be sure to Register Today!

GitLab User Webinars and Labs

  • Our Customer Success team produces regular enablement sessions in each Geo globally that you can attend, and promote for your colleagues and customers.
  • Check out the upcoming sessions and encourage anyone to join them!

Topical Articles on DevSecOps Concepts

  • What is DevOps
    • This extensive article goes into detail about DevOps, the culture, tools, and methods for success. It’s worth 15 minutes.
  • What is a DevOps Platform?
    • Great overview article with 10 primary must-have features and 7 things to consider to get the most out of the platform
  • DevSecOps Defined
    • Can your existing governance practices keep pace with modern development methods? Learn how next-generation software requires a new approach to application security.

1. GitLab Product Overview

Learn what GitLab is, what it offers, and what it does

Customer Facing Resources

  • GitLab Promo Page (Web Page)
    • This is a Why GitLab Page . It’s actually a good elevator pitch! Check it out.
  • GitLab Promo DEMO (Video)
    • This video is a bit longer demo video and shows more about using GitLab (3 min)
  • Platform Page (Web Page)
    • Get to know the basic capability set of GitLab here. Be sure to scroll down to the Solutions GitLab enables and drill into them for more information (20 min read)
  • Solutions Page (Web Page)
    • offers a wide variety of ways customers leverage GitLab (20 min read)

Additional References for You

2. Pitching GitLab and Showcasing a Solution

Learn how to identify the most valuable challenges and leverage the GitLab DevSecOps Platform to create a valuable solution

Customer Facing Resources

  • Build a Business Case for GitLab (Web Page)
    • Guidance for building a business case for GitLab DevSecOps Platform for a customer buying decision maker (20 min)
  • Online ROI calculators (Interactive Tool)
    • Leverage the online ROI calculators, or contact your Partner Account Manager for more sophisticated analysis tools (20 min)
  • Why GitLab (Web Page)
    • Get to know the top reasons customers choose GitLab (10 min)
  • Customer Case Studies (Web Page)
    • Our case studies will give you ideas of why enterprises are choosing GitLab.  Bookmark this for customer justification in deals later. (10 min)

Pitching GitLab and Technical Discovery

  • Positioning GitLab - Handbook Page (Handbook)
    • Review this page to learn about how to position GitLab in the market. (10 min)
  • GitLab Technical Discovery Guide (Handbook)
    • Discovery is a crucial skill for any Solutions Architect (SA).  Here is how GitLab SA’s do their Discovery (10 min)
  • User Personas (Handbook)
    • These are the persona types that are the primary users of GitLab inside your customer.
  • Buyer Personas (Handbook)
    • There are different buyer personas to understand when selling a Platform like GitLab.  Which do you value more? (20 min)

Competitive Information

  • GitLab Maturity Page (Web Page)
    • A very transparent self-assessment of the maturity of each GitLab feature. No direct comparisons with other vendors here.
  • GitLab Competitive Overviews (Portal Assets)
    • Have a look at competitive positioning material in the assets library of the Partner site. (login required)

Demo resources to help you showcase the Platform

  • Product tours (Interactive demos)
    • A great collection of self-guided, hands-on, interactive exercises for (potential) customers, powered by Navattic. They can also serve as substitutes or safe fallbacks for live demos.
  • Start a Free Trial (Web Page)
    • Here is the generic link to start a free trial of GitLab SaaS on GitLab.com. This is an increasingly popular option. Please refer to this page of the Partner Portal for details about how to set up a customized affiliate link to tag new trials to your partnership.
  • GitLab Partner Demo Delivery Guide (GitLab Project)
    • A GitLab Project containing all the resources for partners to successfully deliver a 1-hour-long, high-level, technical overview demo of GitLab. Check out the README for further info.
  • GitLab Learn Labs - Tanuki Racing (GitLab Project)
    • A collection of always up-to-date workshops. These can be used either individually for self-learning, delivered for customers as hands-on workshops or serve as a basis for in-depth demos. Check out the README for further info.
  • Building Pipelines Episode 011 (Video)
    • “Effective GitLab Demos.” (40:16)  More resources and helpful hints are provided.
  • GitLab Partner Demos (Project Catalog)
    • Public group containing demo projects developed by the GitLab Partner SA team for use with and by our partners
  • GitLab Proof of Value Handbook Page
    • This handbook page is a great resource and link aggregation point for resources to conduct Proof Of Values (POVs).
  • The GitLab Demo Page (Handbook)
    • Good reference material for general purpose demos the same way GitLab SA’s do it.
  • Ultimate GitOps Workshop (Workshop Guide)
    • Leverage GitLab K8s agent to deploy to EKS.
  • Guided Explorations (Project Catalog)
    • Contains Joint Reference Architectures, Patterns and Working Examples for integrating GitLab with Alliance and Technology solutions.
  • CI Samples Demo
    • CI functions samples for quick demos

3. Closing the Deal

Learn how to construct and transact a GitLab deal

Customer Facing Resources

  • Customer Pricing Page (Web Page)
    • This is the public price of the subscription. Pricing is a simple per-user subscription that is the same whether you are using SaaS or Self Hosted instance.
  • Customer Case Studies (Web Page)
    • Leverage these for customer justification in deals. (10 min)

Additional References for You

  • Partner Program Incentives Guide (Portal Asset)
    • Review the GitLab Partner Program guide for more details on reseller transactions. (login required)
  • GitLab Price Book (Portal Asset)
    • Review the skews and reseller pricing available to you for quoting to your customers. (login required)

4. Post-sales Implementation and Adoption Journey

Delivery docs and technical guidance for your GitLab practice engineers

GitLab Implementations

GitLab Migrations

  • Partner Migration Services
    • This page outlines the migration services methods, tools, restrictions, and services kits available to partners

Using and Adopting GitLab Effectively

GitLab Channel Service Packages

The following Services are examples that you can take, modify and use to provide your own branded professional consultative services that involve GitLab.

Here are links to the most popular Professional Services topics from the Professional Services Team Handbook page.

Additional Resources

1. Official GitLab Training on Level Up

  • Access GitLab Training from the Partner Portal

    • We use LevelUp that is accessible publicly, but please do not use the site directly as a Partner. Please login through the Partner Portal and access training there. This will ensure that the training you take will be associated with your company partnership with GitLab!

      Start Training from the Partner Portal Start Training from the Partner Portal

2. Additional Enablement Resources at GitLab

  • GitLab Unfiltered Partner Enablement Playlist
    • This is an SA curated playlist of the most informative technical videos on GitLab Unfiltered channel. Some videos here are unlisted and hard to discover otherwise. Bookmark this link!
  • GitLab Security Capabilities
    • Also periodically browse the main GitLab Unfiltered channel. This video tour of GitLab Security capabilities is excellent, but for technical reasons can’t be added to the playlist above. (50:16)
  • Partner Enablement Presentation
    • This deck has some great links associa

3. Technical References

  • GitLab Documentation
    • The best starting point for technical questions. It lists feature descriptions, excellent tutorials, and troubleshooting tips.
  • GitLab Blog
    • Various content about GitLab. Mostly technical stuff, but not exclusively. Subscribing to the newsletter can be useful.
  • Release Overview Website
    • A fairly unknown tool that can help with understanding the changes in each GitLab version. (Source code of the website.) Important features of this website to pay extra attention to:
      • CVEs by version: easily keep track of security vulnerabilities in each GitLab version.
      • Upgrade path: a handy tool which can list the steps of upgrading self-managed GitLab from version X to version Y.
  • Deprecations by version
  • GitLab Releases Blog
    • The same information as the Release Overview website, but in nicely formatted blog posts, ready to share with customers.
  • The GitLab Project
    • The source code of the GitLab software itself. The most useful part is the Issues page, where everybody can check the state of a feature or a bug and see if it’s planned or being worked on.

4. Third-Party & Community Tutorials

Channel Partner Implementation Services
Implementing a GitLab instance Decide between GitLab Community and Enterprise Editions First, you …
Channel Partner Migration Services
GitLab encourages our GitLab Partners to engage in and lead technical services such as migrating to …
Last modified April 23, 2025: Add Partner Value Steam Management Services to the Handbook (9fb32779)
View page source - Edit this page - please contribute. Creative Commons License