WHERE THIS USUALLY STARTS
axq partner sales
Almost every conversation I have begins in one of two places.
01
Preparing for international expansion.
You are a successful technology scale-up. You've won your home market and now the board wants to expand your global footprint. You know you can't just hire 50 people in a new territory and hope for the best. You need a partner ecosystem that provides local expertise and technical implementation from day one.
02
Our partner programme has stalled.
You have a list of signed partners, but no one is actually selling. You're stuck in a cycle of quarterly reviews that yield zero pipeline. You need to move from high-level strategic alignment to operational co-sell mapping, identifying exactly why your partners aren't winning deals and fixing it at the source.
THE WORK
Strategy is the easy half
Most agencies and consultancies stop at the strategy. They deliver a deck, maybe a partner programme architecture, and then they leave. AXQ is built to stay, helping technical firms bridge the gap between having a strategy and having a partner ecosystem that actually produces revenue.
01 Architecture. We design the commercial incentives and structural foundations that give every partner a reason to sell together.
02 Recruitment. Using a targeted, value-led approach to bring in the specific partners required for each region or vertical.
03 Activation. Moving beyond paper-based agreements to active account mapping and operationalised co-sell motions that find new deals.
04 Attribution. Implementing the tracking and influence models required to prove the channel’s impact on the bottom line.
05 Automation. Deploying AI systems to scale partner outreach and engagement without increasing headcount.
The difference between a partner programme that works and one that doesn’t is almost always in the operational detail of the co-sell motion.
TRACK RECORD
Five years at TD SYNNEX
Between 2021 and 2025, John Bates (AXQ Founder), co-led the commercial strategy for AWS and the high-growth software portfolio at TD SYNNEX across Europe. This involved architecting the commercial foundations of a multi-country AWS business and the co-sell motion with the vendor. We built the technical and commercial Partner Strategy & supporting campaigns, designed the sales enablement programme, and established the reporting and attribution models that secured over projected £50M in funding and investment for regional transformation projects.
Vendor
Portfolio
AWS
The pan-European AWS GTM, architecture and commercial model.
Cisco
The technical enablement and recurring revenue system for data partners.
Microsoft
Building the specialized channel for Partner growth & automation across Europe.
Modernizing the distribution model for enterprise data architectures.
Nvidia
Governing the move to cloud-first data management for the channel.
TD SYNNEX is now a leading AWS distributor in Europe, with a business model built on these foundations.
BEFORE THE CHANNEL
Three businesses built from nothing, two exited
The channel was a discovery, but entrepreneurship was not. Before shifting focus to partner ecosystems, I founded and scaled three distinct businesses across different sectors, taking them from zero to profitability and successfully exiting two of them. This period provided the hard-won experience in sales operations, cash-flow management and organisational design that now informs every piece of advice AXQ gives to tech firms looking to build their own global infrastructure.
A SECOND OPINION
Forty five minutes on your partner programme
If you have an existing programme that isn’t producing the pipeline you expected, or if you are architecting a new one and want to ensure the commercial foundations are sound, I offer a review call.
Forty five minutes to look at your current architecture, your partner incentives, and your co-sell motion. No sales pitch, just a second opinion based on five years of building and running international programmes.