Most channel programs fail at a question nobody asks until it's too late: who owns the partner's success after they sign?

Most channel programs fail at a question nobody asks until it's too late: who owns the partner's success after they sign?

The answer is usually nobody. Sales signs the distributor and moves on to the next one. The partner is left to figure out the product, the positioning, and the motion alone. Six months later the channel underperforms and everyone blames the partner.

It's not the partner. It's that partner success was never owned.

Three models I've seen, worst to best.

Nobody owns it. The distributor is signed and abandoned. Common, and the reason most channel programs stall under $10M.

Sales owns it. Better, but sales is paid to close new partners, not to make existing ones productive. Partner success becomes the thing that gets done when there's time, which is never.

A dedicated partner manager owns it. Best. Someone whose entire job is the productivity of existing partners. Onboarding, enablement, QBRs, scorecards, removing the ones who don't perform. Their number is partner output, not partner count.

The threshold is simple. Once you have more than a handful of partners, partner success needs a named owner whose compensation is tied to it. Until then, you don't have a channel program. You have a list of contracts.

Who gets up in the morning responsible for whether your partners actually sell? If you can't name the person, that's the gap.