Best Practices for Tracking External Reps and Partner Attribution in Opportunity Reporting

Happy Monday everyone! I’m looking for advice on how to best track external reps who route referrals to AEs for reporting purposes. Current State: We track the referring rep and their team/segment using dropdown fields on the Opportunity (Deal) record. For example: Referring AE: John Doe | Team: Growth - Jane Smith. The Problem: As we onboard new partners and reps, managing these dropdown menus is becoming a bottleneck. The Goal: We’re considering switching to Association Labels to make this more scalable. Has anyone implemented something similar for external partners? Would love to hear how you’ve set up your reporting for this, or if you’ve found a better way to handle partner attribution for long-term growth.