By John Bates, founder of AXQ
Most partner programmes I have seen do not fail at the launch. The launch goes fine. Partners sign up, the portal fills with logos, and the quarterly update shows a healthy number going the right way.
The trouble starts about six months in, when someone on the leadership team asks a simple question: how much of this quarter's pipeline came from partners? And the honest answer is "not much".
If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. Almost every programme goes through this stage. The good news is that the fix is usually smaller than people expect.
Three signs you are signing but not selling
The partner count goes up. Partner-sourced deals don't.
This is the clearest sign, and the easiest to miss, because the number everyone reports is the one that is growing. Recruitment is visible and satisfying. A new logo is a win you can announce. A partner that brings you a real opportunity is rarer, slower and harder to measure, so it gets less attention.
If your partner count has doubled and partner-sourced pipeline has not moved, you have a recruitment programme, not a sales channel.
Enablement means a portal and a deck.
Partners do not learn to sell your product from a portal. They learn by sitting on a live customer call with someone from your side, watching what questions come up, and seeing the deal move. A training module helps with the basics. It rarely gets a partner's account manager to put your product in front of their best customer.
If your enablement budget goes mostly on content and very little on time with partners in front of customers, that is worth looking at.
Nobody can name the person who wins.
Ask your partner team this: at each of your top ten partners, who personally benefits when a deal with you closes? Not "the company". A named person, with a target to hit or a practice to grow.
If the answer is a list of company names, the programme has relationships with organisations but not with people. Partners are run by people with too many vendors and not enough time. They put effort behind the vendors that help them hit their own number.
Why this happens
None of this comes from bad intent or a weak team. It usually comes from three understandable pressures.
The first is that recruitment is easy to measure and pipeline is not. Programmes drift towards the metric that is easiest to report.
The second is breadth. A new programme is often told to cover the whole market, so the team spreads itself across fifty partners instead of going deep with five.
The third is that most programmes are designed around tiers and benefits, which matter, but say little about the first deal. A partner does not move up a tier until it has sold something, and it will not sell something until someone helps it make the first one work.
The fix is usually a short list
When a programme is signing but not selling, the instinct is often to add something: a new tier, a bigger incentive, a relaunch event. Those can help later. They rarely help first.
What tends to work is the opposite. Pick the five partners most likely to sell this year, and spend most of your time with them.
How to pick them:
- They already sell to your buyer. Not "could", already do, with live customers who look like yours.
- They have a reason to care. A gap in their line card your product fills, or a customer asking for exactly what you do.
- There is a named person who wins. An account manager or practice lead whose own number moves if your product sells.
Then, for each of the five:
- Agree one or two customers to go after together this quarter.
- Put someone from your side on those calls.
- Make the first deal easy: a clear offer, quick answers, and more of the work than feels fair.
- After the first deal, write down what worked, and repeat it with the next partner on the list.
Five partners that sell will teach you more about your programme in a quarter than fifty that signed. They also give you something the rest of the channel pays attention to: proof that partners make money with you.
A note from the partner side
I spent five years at TD SYNNEX (via IQBlade, acquired), leading partner go-to-market programmes for AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia across EMEA. The programmes that grew were nearly always the ones that started narrow and stayed close to a handful of partners until those partners were selling. The ones that stalled were usually the ones measuring sign-ups.
If your partner count looks healthy and your partner pipeline doesn't, it is rarely too late. It usually just needs a shorter list.
John Bates, AXQ
Related: How to build a channel partner program, step by step · How to recruit your first channel partners in the UK · Reigniting a stalled programme