How to use it
These are the twelve questions the founder uses. They are diagnostic rather than clever, and they are meant to be answered honestly in about twenty minutes, ideally by the person who owns the programme and one person who sells alongside it.
If you can answer all twelve quickly, you probably do not need any help. If three or four of them are uncomfortable, that is usually where the revenue is stuck. Tick the ones that are uncomfortable as you go; the count at the end tells you where to start. Nothing you tick leaves this page.
The diagnostic
Four areas, three questions each.
Who the programme is actually for
1. Can you name the three partners who produced the most revenue last quarter, and say why each one did?
Not who is biggest. Who produced. The "why" matters more than the names: if the answer is a person rather than a mechanism, the revenue leaves when the person does.
2. If a partner wanted to sell you tomorrow, what is the first thing they would have to do, and how long does that take?
Walk it yourself. Most programmes have a path that made sense when it was designed and has since grown three approval steps.
3. What proportion of your partner revenue comes from partners who found you, rather than partners you recruited?
A high inbound share looks like success and usually means the recruitment engine is not running. It also means you have less control over which markets you grow into.
Whether the partners can actually sell it
4. How many people at your partners were trained in the last six months, and how many of them have since sold something?
The gap between those two numbers is the real state of enablement. Training volume is the most over-reported metric in the channel.
5. When a partner loses a deal, do you find out why?
If losses only surface as an absence in the pipeline, you are managing the programme on lagging data.
6. Which of your partners could handle a technical objection without you in the room?
This is usually the uncomfortable one. The honest number is often one or two, sometimes none, and it is the true capacity of the programme. Everything above that number is partners who resell your sales effort rather than replace it.
The commercial mechanics
7. Is there a margin a partner can predict before they start selling, or is it negotiated deal by deal?
Predictability is what makes a partner allocate a salesperson to you. Deal-by-deal economics quietly tell them not to.
8. If a customer wants to buy through a hyperscaler marketplace, or through the distributor they already have, can they?
Increasingly the constraint is not whether the customer wants your product. It is whether they can buy it through a contract and a budget line they already have.
9. Who inside your company loses something when a deal goes through a partner?
Channel conflict is almost never a policy problem. It is a compensation problem. If a direct seller's number goes down when a partner wins, the policy will lose, whatever the policy says.
Whether it survives contact with time
10. Who owns this on a Tuesday afternoon, six weeks after launch?
Programmes are launched by senior people and run by nobody. The unglamorous middle is where they die.
11. What is the one number you would take to the board to show this is working, and do you have it today?
If the answer is partner count or registered deals, you will be asked a harder question within two quarters.
12. If you stopped running the programme tomorrow, how long before revenue noticed?
A long answer means the programme is decorative. A short answer means it is load-bearing, which is good news and also the reason it deserves proper attention.
What to do with the answers
Fix one cheap thing before adding a single partner.
Three or four uncomfortable answers is normal and is not a crisis. The useful move is to pick the one that is both uncomfortable and cheap to fix, and fix it before adding a single new partner.
The cheapest high-value fixes, in order, are usually: making margin predictable (question 7), removing one approval step from onboarding (question 2), and finding out why you lose (question 5). The expensive ones are compensation (question 9) and genuine partner capability (question 6), and they are expensive because they are the ones that actually move the number.
If several answers point to a programme that signs partners but does not produce pipeline, the stalled programme playbook covers re-engaging partners who have gone cold, co-sell on named accounts and the leading indicators to watch. For the broader picture, see partner and alliance programmes.
Written by John Bates, founder of AXQ. Five years at TD SYNNEX as key account lead for AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, responsible for end to end delivery of EMEA partner GTM strategy. Research and operations at AXQ are run by a small team of AI agents, overseen by the founder.