AI killed the 80/20 rule in partnerships. Relying on your top 20% of partners to bring 80% of your revenue is a recipe for disaster. Welcome to the Golden Age of Partnerships... where every single partnership matters.
The central challenge for partnerships has always been resourcing.
Not enough time to onboard, manage, enable, train, track, update, and engage all of your partners.
So partner managers sign tons of partners and hope that some of them will lean in.
They spend all of their time on the most active partners (or the ones making the most noise).
But this is straight up gambling. You're hoping you’re spending the time on the right ones.
Ultimately, there is a ton of value within your partner portfolio across the top 20% and the bottom 80% that is untapped because no one has the data, tools, or time to really optimize every single relationship.
The result is good news / bad news:
Bad news - Most of your partners are underperforming :(
Good news - Most of your partners are underperforming!
So here’s what has changed… AI!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - AI is a massive opportunity for partnerships.
All you have to do now is create your ideal partner experience and then leverage the multitude of AI tools To create incredible partner experiences - not just for your top 20%, but for ALL of your partners.
With many AI tools you can create personalized enablement plans and more in minutes.
You can put all of your partner tracking data into something like Claude Co-Work and get instant trend analysis on your portfolio.
You can build automation after automation for your workflow to keep you and your partners updated with exactly what's going on with the program and pipeline.
I could go on and on, but ultimately it’s up to each partner leader to dive headfirst into this brave new world.
The Golden Age of Partnerships is here, let’s go!
This week on Partnerships Unlocked
Fabian Eckstrom French on how to multiply your partner team's output without making a single hire
Fabian Eckstrom French has built three partner ecosystems from zero and turned around a broken one. He currently leads Strategic Alliances at Esper. Over a decade in SaaS partnerships, most of his best lessons came from getting it wrong first.
Fabian joined me on Partnerships Unlocked this week. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Align internally on your scoreboard before you do anything else. Your CFO cares about sourced revenue. Not influenced. Not activity. If you are not building toward that number, you are building toward the wrong thing.
Build your internal relationships before your external ones. If your own teams are not aligned, your partners will feel it before you do.
Stop measuring partners signed. Signing 30 partners is easy. What did those 30 partners actually do for the business? That is the only question that matters.
AI is not optional anymore. Fabian used Claude Code at a conference in Taiwan to schedule meetings with OEM partners through a broken app — without an assistant, without manual work. It just handled it.
A PAM team of two or three people layered with the right AI tools operates like double or triple that. The gap between teams using it and teams ignoring it is only going to grow.
Watch the full episode for the complete playbook from Fabian.
Stop managing. Start multiplying.
Most partner teams don't need more people. They need fewer things consuming their time.
We've seen it first hand - EULER customers leveraging our AI agents - or our MCP - are able to give all of their partners a personalized on-demand experience - and partners LOVE it!
Now every partner can have a 24/7 AI Partner Account Manager in their portal, slack, phone, and LLM - answering questions, tracking deals, submitting leads - all without your team in the loop. DealFlow AI captures and attributes every lead automatically, whether it comes through Slack, email, or the portal. And POPS AI gives your team instant cross-program visibility, pipeline, performance, commissions, without pulling a single report manually.
Less manual work. Happier partners. Bigger results.
Takeaway of the week
The best partner programs in 2026 won't be the ones with the biggest teams. They’ll be the ones that leveraged AI early.