It Isn't Just About You
How Channel Marketing Gets It Wrong
Rik Wright
The best channel programs recognize that partners succeed by creating value for each other.
Many companies continue to struggle to turn partnerships into predictable revenue.
New partners often fail to generate meaningful pipeline, experienced ones participate inconsistently, and revenue frequently becomes concentrated among a relatively small percentage of the program. The instinctive response is to refine incentives, recruit additional companies, or expand enablement. Those initiatives may improve execution, but they rarely address the underlying issue.
The problem is often much simpler. Many organizations have built comprehensive channel programs without ever clearly defining the sales motion they expect their co-sellers to execute.
The Economics Have Changed
Enterprise technology has shifted from perpetual licensing and hardware sales toward subscriptions, cloud services, managed offerings, and usage-based pricing. As a result, the commercial relationship between companies has fundamentally changed. Partners are no longer compensated primarily for introducing a product. Their long-term profitability increasingly depends on implementation, managed operations, consulting, optimization, security, and other ongoing engagements. In many cases, the technology itself has become only one component of a much broader offering.
Technology now plays a different role within the partner's business. A Managed Service Provider is not attempting to maximize the other company's revenue; it is building recurring service revenue. A consultancy is selling expertise rather than product features. Systems Integrators assemble complete solutions that frequently combine multiple providers, cloud platforms, and professional services. Technology becomes valuable to the partner only when it strengthens their broader value proposition.
Many channel efforts, however, continue to be designed as though the technology remains the primary product being sold.
Co-Marketing Alone Isn't the Answer
Recent industry research paints a remarkably consistent picture. Organizations report difficulty aligning joint sales motions with strategic objectives while measuring performance only sporadically. They increasingly identify co-selling as more valuable than additional training, yet many continue to describe co-marketing efforts as too generic to support meaningful conversations. Viewed independently, these appear to be separate operational challenges. Collectively, they point toward a common strategic gap. Most partners understand the products they represent; they are far less certain how the other company expects those products to create demand within their own businesses.
A successful sales motion answers questions that most channel programs never address explicitly. Which customer profiles should partners prioritize? Which customer problems consistently justify the investment? How should the technology be packaged alongside the individual services? At what stage should the other company become directly involved? What characteristics distinguish a qualified lead from one unlikely to close?
Without consistent answers, each organization develops its own motion. Some discover an effective approach through experience or market specialization. Others never identify a repeatable model at all. The resulting variation is often interpreted as inconsistent execution when it is more accurately explained by inconsistent strategic direction.
You're Missing the Point
Most businesses respond to slow channel performance by further investing in joint campaigns. They expand training, create additional marketing assets, refine incentive programs, or introduce new certifications. Product training improves technical knowledge. Certifications validate competency. Marketing increases awareness. Incentives influence behavior. None of those activities define how demand should be created.
Businesses are not necessarily asking the partners to participate because they lack selling capability. More often, they want access to expertise that strengthens critical stages of the sales cycle: executive engagement, technical validation, commercial design, competitive positioning, or complex solution architecture. Those contributions improve the probability of closing the sale because they reinforce existing customer relationships.
Marketing has evolved in much the same way. Product-focused collateral remains necessary, but it is rarely sufficient. Partners need customer stories that resemble their current messaging, business cases that support the services they deliver, and campaigns that generate leads aligned with their revenue and compensation models. The objective is to make the technology an integral component of the broader joint value proposition.
Rethinking Co-Selling
The most effective channel organizations recognize that campaign execution and strategy serve different purposes. Certifications, incentives, portals, and enablement only create the operational framework of a program. A sales motion defines how joint sellers create demand, where they make money, when the other company participates in the sales cycle, and how both organizations measure success. Once those decisions are made, every other element of the program reinforces the same objective.
Technology companies will continue moving toward recurring revenue and service-oriented business models, making the distinction between managing partners and defining a sales motion increasingly important. Companies that focus exclusively on improving partner programs may continue to refine execution while overlooking the more fundamental question. Before organizations decide how they will manage the channel, they should first determine how they expect those partners to build successful businesses around their technology. Joint selling works best when every campaign, every conversation, and every engagement is designed to create mutual value.
We have a little more to say on the matter.
This article is based on deep research we conducted and the practical guide we created to provide guidance on partner economics, operating models, marketplace routes, and implementation choices for cloud and usage-based service models.
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