My friend is a VP of Partnerships at a billion dollar public company. He asked me: "When should we build tiering into our program?" Sounds like a strategy question. It's actually a trap.
Here's what was happening on his end.
Leadership was over-engineering a program that was still in its early stages. Adding complicated tiering structures around vague value propositions. Building benefit frameworks for use cases they didn't have yet. Trying to emulate programs that took much larger companies years to build.
The result? A program that was harder to understand than the one they replaced.
There's a reason large partner programs are complex.
They didn't just start that way. They got there because they eventually had:
- Lots of partners across multiple types
- Varying program and GTM motions
- Real need to differentiate and stratify as volume grew
- Specific partner behaviors they needed to incentivize at scale
That complexity was not designed in advance.
Your partners are customers of your partner program.
The best companies don't build the product they think customers want. They build what customers actually need right now, make it easy to use, and iterate from there.
Your partner program should work exactly the same way.
Let complexity grow organically as the program requires it.
Scale down to scale up.
This week on Partnerships Unlocked
Darren Bibby on why sales reps avoid partner deals, and what to do about it
Darren Bibby led partner programs at Docusign, growing partner revenue from 15% to 45% while the company tripled. Before that, 10 years at IDC advising Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, and SAP.
Darren joined me this week and shared some incredible insights from 30+ years of channel experience. Here are just 4 of the takeaways:
If reps only get credit on what's left after partner discounts, they will avoid partners. Every time. Give them full quota credit on partner deals and the behavior changes overnight.
Getting this approved took Darren two years.He benchmarked other companies, collected quotes from burned resellers, and ran the math with finance. That's what moved a sales-first org.
Lunch-and-learns don't work. Darren asked 130 new sales employees who knew what an ISV was. One hand went up. That’s when he knew enablement needed to change.
Voice of the partner is a system, not an annual event. Surveys, advisory councils, regular check-ins. If you're not doing this consistently, every program decision you make is a guess.
Many more insights on full episode below!
Your reps won't work with partners if it's harder than going direct.
The fix isn't more enablement. It's removing the friction entirely. EULER’s POPS AI puts partner context (deals, questions, updates, co-sell motions) directly inside Slack and your CRM, so reps never have to leave their workflow to collaborate with a partner.
Partners get a 24/7 AI that answers their questions instantly. Reps get access without chasing anyone. And your partner team stops being the bottleneck in the middle.
Takeaway of the week
If your reps aren’t incentivized to work with partners, no amount of enablement will fix it.