If your partnership strategy is not having the impact you thought it would have, it’s easy to question whether you made the right hire. The real reason might be something totally different.
You’re an executive or a founder at an ambitious ISV. You’ve noticed a gap in your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Your board members are whispering about “the channel” during every review. You see your competitors spinning up OEM deals and strategic alliances that seem to be printing money. Naturally, you decide it is time to get serious.
So, you go out and find a heavy hitter. You hire a Head of Partnerships, maybe even a VP or Director level. You write a job description filled with high-level buzzwords like “build our partner ecosystem,” “drive co-sell motions,” and “develop a tiered partner program.” You think to yourself, this person is an expert. They will figure it out and come back to me with a plan.
Six months later, you’re looking at a pipeline that is dangerously thin. Your new hire is constantly in meetings, but nothing is moving the needle. You might start to wonder whether partnerships are the right fit for your specific niche.
In many cases, the issue isn’t the person you hired. It’s the environment they’re operating in.
The illusion of progress versus actual GTM movement
What does a “struggling” Head of Partnerships actually look like? Most of the time, they look incredibly busy. They are in back-to-back partner relationship calls. They are building decks about partner tiers and certification levels that nobody in your company asked to see. They are trying to get time on a sales all-hands meeting that keeps getting rescheduled because the VP of Sales sees partnerships as a lower priority.
Companies that primarily sell directly to end users often treat partnerships as a secondary motion. We hire someone to “do partnerships” and then isolate them from the rest of the revenue-generating machine.
When your new hire asked for a quota, you told them, “let’s see how things develop.” When they asked for a dedicated Sales Engineer (SE) to help with technical onboarding for partners, you told them to “coordinate with Sales.” When they asked how partnerships fit into the compensation plan for your Account Executives (AEs), you said, “that is a great question, let’s loop in RevOps.”
But in practice, that coordination often doesn’t happen. The Sales team is incentivized to focus on direct opportunities, and anything outside of that naturally gets deprioritized. You end up with a partnership function that exists on paper, but isn’t fully connected to how revenue is actually generated.
Partnerships are a GTM function, not an experiment
If you want partnerships to work, you have to stop treating them like a side project and start treating them like a core GTM function. A partner program doesn’t materialize just because you hired one person with a rolodex.
A true partnership strategy requires a seat where decisions are actually made. If your Head of Partnerships is not integrated into the sales motion, their ability to drive revenue will be limited. They might get you some logos for your website, but translating that into consistent pipeline is much harder.
Think about it this way: Would you hire a Head of Sales and tell them they don’t have a budget, they can’t talk to the marketing team, and their reps won’t get paid commission on the deals they close? Of course not. Yet, in many organizations, partnership roles are set up with similar constraints.
Moving away from a “wait and see” approach is often a turning point. If partnerships are going to be part of how you go to market, they need a number, they need resources, and they need executive-level alignment on how they fit into the broader sales motion.
Why your sales team is ghosting your partner lead
One of the most common bottlenecks in a partnership program is the existing sales culture. If your AEs feel that working with a partner creates more complexity without a clear upside, they will naturally deprioritize it. Even a strong Head of Partnerships will struggle to gain traction in that environment.
Is your team actually rewarded for co-selling, or are they required to navigate additional steps to prove partner involvement before seeing any benefit? If your comp plan doesn’t reflect your partnership goals, those goals are unlikely to translate into day-to-day behavior.
It also comes down to visibility. Partner-sourced or partner-influenced opportunities need to be clearly surfaced within your CRM and sales processes. Without that, it becomes difficult for sales teams to understand where partnerships add value, and even harder to act on it.
The necessity of dedicated resources and SE support
Another common challenge is access to technical resources. Asking a partnership lead to rely entirely on shared Sales Engineers can create friction, especially when priorities compete. Direct revenue opportunities will almost always take precedence.
Partnerships, particularly OEM relationships or deeper integrations, require consistent technical support. Without it, partners face challenges in building, demonstrating, and ultimately selling your solution.
Allocating dedicated or at least reliably accessible technical resources signals that partnerships are a priority. Without that support, progress tends to stall before it translates into meaningful pipeline.
How to pivot to a holistic marketing and GTM approach
At MediaDev, we’ve spent years helping software vendors navigate these exact waters. What we’ve found is that the most successful ISVs don’t view partnerships as a silo. Instead, they adopt a holistic marketing approach.
That means marketing, sales, and partnerships are aligned around shared outcomes. Content supports partner use cases. Lead generation efforts create opportunities that partners can engage with. Sales teams understand when and how to involve partners in a deal cycle.
In many cases, the issue isn’t the individual leading partnerships, but whether the organization has made a clear decision to operationalize partnerships as part of its growth strategy.
If that decision hasn’t been made, the role often ends up carrying expectations it wasn’t set up to meet.
Actionable steps to rescue your partnership program
If you realize you’ve fallen into the partnership trap, here is how you climb out:
- Give them a number. Stop with the “let’s see” KPIs. Give your partnership lead a revenue target and the authority to pursue it.
- Fix the comp plan. Ensure AEs are incentivized, not penalized, for bringing partners into deals.
- Allocate dedicated resources. This can include marketing support, technical expertise, or budget tied specifically to partnership initiatives.
- Integrate into the sales motion. Partner conversations should happen in the same room where sales strategy is set, not in a siloed “update” meeting.
- Bring in outside perspective. Sometimes you need an expert to audit your GTM and identify where the friction is. That is where choosing a partner like MediaDev comes in. We understand the specific nuances of the software ecosystem and can help you build the frameworks your team needs to actually succeed.
All this to say, partnerships are a beast. They are complex, they are messy, and they require a lot of internal political capital to get right. But when they work? They are the most powerful growth lever in the B2B software world.
If results aren’t where you expected them to be, it’s worth looking beyond the individual role and examining the structure around it. The question is less about whether partnerships can work, and more about whether the organization is set up to support them.
