I’ve spent the better part of three decades in enterprise software and I’ve seen the same pattern play out more times than I can count.
A technology company has hundreds of partners on its roster. It has a tiered program – Gold, Silver, Platinum, Diamond, whatever the precious metal of the month is. It has certification requirements, specializations, a discount matrix, and a partner portal that took two years and seven figures to build. And it has almost nothing to show for it in terms of meaningful partner-sourced growth, customer adoption, or ecosystem-driven competitive advantage.
The program exists. The partners are listed. The business isn’t moving. Or maybe it is but there aren’t definitive reasons as to why (I’ve heard more than once “our numbers are good but if you ask anyone they’ll say the channel isn’t working”). And the reason isn’t that partners don’t work. The reason is that the model was built for a world that no longer exists.
The Old Model Is Broken
The precious-metal tier model made sense in a simpler era. Partners had distinct identities – resellers sold, system integrators implemented, ISVs built. You rewarded them for revenue and certifications, and the model was clear enough. That world is gone.
Today’s partners don’t fit in boxes. The same partner who resells your product is also delivering managed services, advising customers on digital transformation strategy, building AI-powered solutions on top of your platform, and influencing three other deals they’re not registered on. They’re not one thing. They’re everything, often simultaneously, often at the same account.
And yet most partner programs still ask that partner to pick a tier, earn a certification, and get compensated primarily for the deal they sourced and / or closed on their paper. Everything else they do from the advisory work, the adoption support, the customer relationships they bring, the competitive deals they influence all goes unrecognized and unrewarded. The reason for that is that those partner programs – along with the underlying systems supporting the business – were built to track opportunities where the underlying assumption is that there is one partner of record on the opportunity who has one role.
Furthermore, those underlying systems were largely built to support the internal sales motion where deals are closed by internal sellers. Resellers were bolted on at a later date when we started tracking partners who were putting deals on their paper. “Influence” is an ongoing debate amongst many people who don’t understand what the partners are actually doing or know how to adequately / accurately track it and attach a value. And other motions continue to come along that also get bolted onto the original system making it very difficult to look at the partner business as a whole and even more difficult for a partner to understand where they are in your program at any given point in time. Are they a silver level MSSP, a platinum reseller, an advanced service delivery partner? What are the benefits and requirements for each of those? If it takes a phD and access to dozens of partner portals to understand each program, does it make sense for them to continue investing in the complexity?
When you build a program that only sees part of what a partner does and forces them to pick a lane regardless of how their business operates, partners respond accordingly. They do the part you measure and ignore the rest. Then you wonder why adoption is low, why customers churn, and why your ecosystem isn’t performing the way you hoped.
And here’s another story to consider: I was recently at a conference where a large, US-based partner asked the room “how many of you partner with us?” About half of the hands in the room went up. Then he asked “and how many of you would consider us your most strategic channel partner?” and many of the hands stayed up. And then he said “we have 650 vendors on our partner list so how can we be the top for every one of them? We can’t, so we have to prioritize.” They will prioritize for those who build programs they understand, programs they can easily navigate, programs that are predictable, and programs that are profitable based on their business model, not the vendor’s.
The 6.3 Partner Problem
Here’s a number that should fundamentally change how you think about partner compensation: according to Omdia research, there are an average of 6.3 partners involved in every enterprise technology deal.
Six point three.
And yet the overwhelming majority of partner programs are built around a single-partner compensation model: one deal registration, one partner who gets credit – typically to support one channel manager who gets paid, one relationship that gets rewarded. The other five-plus partners who influenced the decision, supported the evaluation, brought the customer relationship, or will ultimately be responsible for making the customer successful? They get nothing. Or close to it.
This isn’t just an equity problem. It’s a strategic miscalculation. When partners learn that their influence, their advisory work, and their customer relationships only get compensated if they happen to be the one who clicks “register deal” first, they stop doing the things that actually drive your business. They disengage from deals where they aren’t the primary. They stop investing in customer relationships they don’t own on paper. They route business to vendors whose programs recognize what they actually contribute.
You are not just leaving revenue on the table. You are actively training your ecosystem to underperform.
Build for What Partners Actually Do
The shift that separates high-performing ecosystems from the rest isn’t more tiers or more certifications. It’s a fundamental redesign of what you’re measuring, recognizing, and rewarding.
Stop designing programs around partner types. Start designing them around partner behaviors, roles and contributions across the full customer and deal lifecycle, around customer outcomes and the partners who help them achieve those outcomes.
That means incentivizing influence, not just sourcing. This is especially important as we see B2B influencers taking shape as a new motion. It means compensating for co-selling, services delivery, and customer adoption and expansion, not just for getting a signature on a contract that is now typically done via a marketplace. It means building a program that can see and reward the advisory partner who brought the relationship, the MSP who will own the customer’s day-to-day success, the cloud partner who architected the solution, and the services partner who will drive adoption even – especially– when all of them are in the same deal.
When you align partner incentives with customer outcomes rather than transaction events, something powerful happens: partners start behaving like an extension of your business rather than an independent channel you’re trying to influence. They invest in customers’ success because they’re rewarded for it. They stay engaged post-sale because the program values what happens after the deal closes. They bring you into opportunities earlier because the economics of doing so actually make sense for them.
This is how ecosystems start to compound. Not by adding more partners to the roster, but by building a program that makes the partners you have genuinely successful.
Partner Success Is the Missing Link
Every software company talks about customer success. The best ecosystem companies have figured out that you cannot have customer success at scale without partner success as its foundation.
Think about it from the customer’s perspective. In most enterprise technology deployments, it isn’t the vendor alone who is sitting across the table during implementation, driving adoption, and managing the ongoing relationship, it’s partners. An MSP, a system integrator, a trusted advisor who recommended the solution in the first place. Those partners are the face of your product to that customer. Their capability, their commitment, and their investment in outcomes is what the customer experiences.
If that partner isn’t properly enabled, if they don’t fully understand your product roadmap, if they aren’t supported when things get hard, if the economics of the engagement don’t justify their continued investment, the customer feels it. Adoption suffers. Renewal conversations get difficult because they’re transactional. The competitive moat you thought you were building turns out to be a gap your competition can walk right through.
Partner success, meaning the deliberate, resourced, ongoing investment in your partners’ ability to deliver great outcomes, isn’t a nice-to-have program component. It’s the mechanism by which your ecosystem creates durable customer value. Get it right, and you have a flywheel: successful partners create successful customers, who expand their deployments, generate references, and bring new opportunities back into the ecosystem. Get it wrong, and you have a churn problem with a partner logo on it.
This Is Bigger Than a Partner Program
Everything I’ve described above – recognizing the full spectrum of what partners do, tracking and compensating for all of the roles they play in a deal, investing in partner success as a driver of customer outcomes – points to a conclusion that makes a lot of organizations uncomfortable:
You cannot fix this with a program redesign alone.
The systems, processes, and data infrastructure that most technology companies operate today were not built to capture all of these moments. They weren’t built to track partner influence across a six-partner deal. CFO’s will say the financial models weren’t built to pay 6 partners and 6 partner managers for each deal. They weren’t built to measure adoption contributions or attribute customer success outcomes back to ecosystem investment. They were built to register deals, process discounts, and track certifications… the old model, embedded in architecture and process.
Rebuilding the partner program without rebuilding the underlying GTM framework is like repainting a house with a cracked foundation. The program will look better for a while, and then the same cracks will appear.
The companies that are figuring this out are approaching this as a GTM transformation, not a channel program refresh. They’re asking different questions: How do we instrument our ecosystem so we can see what’s actually happening? How do we build partner data into our revenue operations model? How do we align sales, customer success, and partner teams around shared definitions of what a successful customer outcome looks like?
Those are the right questions. And they’re the ones worth spending serious time on, which is exactly what we’ll dig into in the posts ahead.
Leave a Reply