Partner Channel Program

Partner Channel Program

Design the overall architecture of a B2B partner/channel program from scratch. This skill is the architect: it decides whether a program should exist at all, which structural components it needs - motions, tiers, economics envelope, governance, horizon - and how they fit together, then hands the detailed design of each component to a specialist skill (see Reference).

The field's best-documented failure cause is structural, not tactical: launching a program to fix a direct motion that is not working. Partners amplify a working motion; they do not fix a broken one. The sequence below runs strategy before structure, and its gate is allowed to answer "not yet."

Interview

Ask before designing anything. Ask one question per message, offering multiple-choice answers when possible. Skip a question only when the user already gave the answer.

• Is the business B2B or B2C? For consumer businesses (dealer, franchise, ambassador models) part of the design genuinely diverges - see references/b2b-b2c-contrast.md.
• What is the ACV or price point of what partners would sell or influence?
• Is the direct sales motion already repeatable, with product-market fit proven? What is the evidence?
• What is the gross margin, and how much of it could fund partner compensation?
• Do informal partners already exist - agencies, integrators, consultants servicing your customers - or has anyone approached you about partnering?
• Who will own the program day to day, and who do they report to?
• What resourcing is committed: dedicated headcount, budget, and an executive sponsor by name?
• How are direct reps compensated today on a deal a partner touches - neutral, penalized, or undefined?
• What does success mean, and by what date must the first partner-sourced result land? Name the metric (revenue share, pipeline, coverage), the date, and who judges it then.
• Do you want a one-off win this year or a compounding asset? Both are legitimate answers; they select different motions.
• Given that resourcing, what is the effort ceiling this program must live inside - hours per week for the owner, whether standing headcount is fundable at all, and how much of the design must stay reversible?

Those last three answers re-rank step 4's motion menu - carry them there instead of re-asking:

• A hard date inside two quarters deletes reseller and services-SI: neither produces revenue that fast.
• A compounding mandate promotes technology partnerships and reseller coverage.
• A number needed this year promotes referral.
• No fundable standing headcount deletes reseller and services-SI again, and a team of one leaves referral plus at most one integration.

Workflow

1. Run the Interview; collect every answer the gate and the architecture depend on.
2. Apply the readiness gate. Disqualifiers, any one of which means the honest answer is "not yet":

• The direct motion is not repeatable, or partnerships are expected to fix a growth problem.
• ACV too low to fund human-heavy partner work (very low ACV supports referral-only at most - reseller/SI motions need far more).
• Gross margin that cannot fund partner margin.
• No named executive sponsor.

Say so, name what must change and the lighter motion (if any) that still fits, and stop. Full gate: references/readiness-and-failure-modes.md.

1. Write the partner value proposition before any vendor ask - a one-sentence answer to "what is in this for the partner", plus the economic shape behind it. A program must give (a clear way to make money, training, deal protection, vendor air cover) before it may ask (dedicated reps, certifications, registration discipline). Capture it as a Partner Hypothesis - 1-2 pages naming the target partner type, why they would engage, and the expected economics - to be validated with 2-3 real prospective partners before anything is built on it.
2. Choose partner motions before any partner-profile work, from this menu, ranked by value returned per unit of effort - not by ceiling, and not cheapest-first. Say the order out loud to the user, then pick the minimum viable set, not every motion. The axes disagree, so read all of them:

• efficiency: referral > technology > services-SI > reseller
• effort: reseller > services-SI > technology > referral
• value ceiling: reseller > services-SI > technology > referral
• time-to-effect: reseller > technology > services-SI > referral
• compliance cost: reseller > services-SI > technology == referral (tie argued: neither a technology nor a referral motion creates a contractual margin commitment or third-party delivery liability, and both are terminable in a paragraph)

Each motion, with its trade-off:

• Referral - near-zero standing effort: a commission rule, a link or a form, one tracking field. Buys warm introductions into accounts you already know how to sell. Low ceiling, adds no delivery capacity. Default first rung unless a constraint below deletes it.
• Technology - a quarter of engineering, then a standing maintenance obligation, and no margin paid out. Buys durable surface: an integration keeps producing joint accounts and retention after the launch push stops. Slowest of the light motions to first revenue, so it needs the compounding mandate from the Interview to justify itself.
• Services-SI - enablement content, a delivery-quality bar, and standing partner-manager time. Buys delivery capacity you did not hire and unblocks deals that stall on implementation. Pays only where implementation is a real buying obstacle; where it is not, this is coordination bought for nothing.
• Reseller - a standing job: agreements, a margin table, order flow, deal registration, conflict policy, direct-rep comp neutrality, legal sign-off on resale terms. Buys coverage - segments and geographies you cannot reach directly - at the highest ceiling and the longest lead time. Hardest to reverse: unwinding it means re-papering signed agreements.

What this order starves: reseller and services-SI. Both top the value-ceiling line and top the effort line at once, so the ratio puts them last in every round. A program that only ever obeys the efficiency line stays a referral program permanently: the coverage direct cannot reach and the delivery capacity that unblocks stalled implementations both stay unbought.

Promote reseller above the light motions when reaching a named segment or geography is the stated goal of the program and standing headcount is funded. Promote services-SI when implementation shows up as a named reason in lost or stalled deals, not when an SI relationship merely exists. Neither is promoted by ambition, and neither wins a ratio it is built to lose.

Constraints delete rows rather than demoting them. A deleted motion goes on the spec's Motions line with the trigger that would reopen it:

• An ACV that cannot fund the partner's own cost of sale deletes reseller and services-SI outright.
• A product that cannot be resold for contractual or technical reasons deletes reseller.
• No fundable standing headcount deletes both.

This order is a default, not a law: it shifts with context and with who executes it. Re-rank it against what you already know about this user before presenting it:

• An agency or SI already servicing their customers promotes services-SI to the top, because the recruitment effort is already spent.
• An existing platform-marketplace relationship promotes technology for the same reason.
• A team of one collapses the menu to referral plus at most one integration.