Five Things to Avoid When Building a Partner Channel

A signed agreement is a permit. It grants the right to break ground. It does not pour concrete.

Sixty to seventy percent of strategic alliances fail — Hughes and Weiss published that range in Harvard Business Review years ago and it has not moved. The Channel Company found something sharper: 29% of technology partners formally terminated a vendor relationship inside twelve months, and another 41% simply stopped selling without telling anyone.

Seventy percent. And the second number is the one that should worry you, because those partners never filed paperwork. They are still on the slide, still in the coverage figure somebody reports to the board.

Yet the moment a large logo signs, irrational exuberance takes over. Press release. Executive photo. A new line in the deck. Someone books the revenue in a model.

A mentee asked recently how to build a channel from scratch. The useful answer was five things to avoid rather than five things to do, because the mistakes are far more predictable than the wins.

1. Do not mistake a signature for a channel

At a large hyperscaler, top-three MSSP coverage was a must-have on the CRO’s plan. We signed all three. On paper, the strongest security channel in the portfolio.

Then nobody walked the last mile. No co-sell headcount against those accounts. Compensation never aligned, so our sellers had no reason to pull a partner into a deal. And the question nobody would settle — were we selling licences or were they delivering services — stayed open long enough that both sides quietly optimised around it.

The partners were right. The mandate was right. The operating decisions never got made. Everyone did exactly what they were measured on, and nobody was measured on the last mile.

In infrastructure or productivity software a dead partnership still limps along on refresh cycles and renewals. Security gives you none of that. Every deal asks the partner to displace an incumbent, absorb liability and work to a compliance calendar they do not control. Nothing arrives on inertia.

So before you sign, settle three things in writing: who co-sells, how they are compensated, and who owns delivery. A mandate produces signatures. Only operating decisions produce revenue.

2. Do not recruit the alliance manager

Alliance managers sign agreements. Practice leads assign engineers. If you have not convinced the person who owns delivery capacity, you have a document rather than a partnership.

3. Do not fight the services margin

Partners do not sell your product. They sell their practice, and your product is an ingredient. In security the services attach is usually several times licence value — their moat, not your leakage. Fund enablement rather than event MDF. Build their practice and you become structural. Resent it and you are a line item waiting to be swapped.

4. Do not forecast on your calendar

Your quarter is irrelevant to their deal. Security spend moves on somebody else’s clock, and each compliance regime has its own rhythm. Annual validation clusters around acquirer deadlines, and the remediation work starts months before the assessment date — which is when the buying happens. Elsewhere the purchase lands before the observation window opens rather than during it, so a partner waiting for the audit is already a quarter late. Three-year certifications carry annual surveillance audits between them: two differently sized events on a published cycle. Contract-vehicle-driven spend sits in award timelines, not fiscal years. And some regimes have no certificate to chase at all, only board-level accountability and incident-reporting clocks that turn one breach into a permanent budget line.

Then the two most underrated triggers, because they arrive from outside IT entirely: cyber insurance renewal, where MFA and EDR are now conditions of coverage, and the enterprise customer security questionnaire that blocks a deal until it is answered.

A partner who maps their install base by regime can forecast six to twelve months out. A partner who cannot is guessing — and a vendor who forces them into your fiscal rhythm simply teaches them to sandbag.

5. Do not ignore what is already in their bag

Almost every security deal is a displacement, and the thing displaced is often something that same partner resells. You are asking them to un-sell their own margin. Nobody volunteers for that to help you hit a number. Find where you are additive to their portfolio, or accept that you are funding a fight you cannot see.

One metric holds all five together

Partners with two or more deals in the last two quarters. Not signed. Not certified. Transacting. Every channel dashboard I have inherited counted the wrong thing.

The same mistakes are visible in AI right now. Logos signed at record pace into a category with no compliance calendar, scarce skills and a line-of-business buyer. The ceremonies look identical. The activation rates will be worse.

Sources and verification notes

The 60–70% strategic alliance failure rate is from Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss in Harvard Business Review — long-standing and widely replicated. The partner figures (29% formally terminated, 41% stopped selling without notifying the vendor) are as reported by The Channel Company, and are attributed as reported rather than asserted as fact, since the published methodology is thin.

Compliance cadences are described as rhythms rather than dated deadlines, deliberately. Effective dates shift; cadences do not.

The hyperscaler MSSP account is described without naming the vendor, the partners or the period, per NDA. The detail carrying the argument is the operating failure, not the logo.

A version of this piece first appeared on LinkedIn as “Five Things to Avoid When Building a Partner Channel”.