Here’s a question I’ve been asking a lot lately: Do you actually know what your partners are working on right now?
Not what was in the last QBR deck. Not what got shared on the last partner call. What they’re genuinely progressing, today, on your products.
For most vendors, genuine partner pipeline visibility requires knowing in real time which opportunities your partners are working, and that depends entirely on whether your deal registration process is working.
If the honest answer is “not really,” you’ve got a deal registration problem. And the reason it’s not working is probably not what you think.
The two things that actually break deal reg
There’s the technology problem, your stack doesn’t support deal reg properly, so partners have nowhere to submit even if they wanted to. More common than vendors admit, particularly in programmes that have grown without a proper PRM. This one is fixable without a massive implementation project. Deal reg tools exist that don’t require you to overhaul your entire tech stack. Then there’s the trust problem. You’ve got the technology. You’ve got the process. Partners still aren’t using it. Before you write that off as an attitude problem, ask yourself what deal registration actually offers your partners. Because from their side, it’s an act of disclosure. They’re telling you which opportunities they’re working, with which customers, on which of your products. That’s valuable information. And if they’ve ever seen that information used in a way that didn’t work out well for them (a deal reassigned, a direct motion opened up on the same account), they remember it. And they probably told their mates. If any of these deal reg issues sound familiar, it’s likely your deal reg reputation in your partner ecosystem has been tarnished.
Finding out the truth
How to Find Out Why Partners Aren’t Registering Deals
Don’t ask your account managers to find out why partners aren’t registering. The relationship dynamic produces polite non-answers. Bring in someone external, run anonymised feedback, and ask partners what they think happens to a deal once they register it.
What comes back tends to be more candid, and more useful, than anything you’d get on a joint call.
Then look at your deal protection terms. Rewrite them. Add them to your Partner Programme. Make the protection specific and enforceable. Tell your partners you’ve done it. Tell your direct and channel sales teams you’ve done it. And tell your partners to come to you if they think they aren’t being followed. Rebuild the trust.
Making it stick with incentives
How Deal Registration Incentives Improve Partner Pipeline Visibility
Once the process and the trust are in place, the last lever is behavioural. Some partners understand the rules, believe in the protection, and still don’t register consistently. At that point you need to make the hassle of deal reg worth doing, which means rewarding it.
A deal reg incentive gives you a genuine reason to re-engage partners who’ve gone quiet, and it instils the habit through positive reinforcement rather than policy enforcement.
Partners who get rewarded for registering deals register more of them. And the pipeline visibility that follows improves everything: how you forecast, how you resource, where you invest.
At Incentivizer™, we’ve built a channel incentive platform that makes this straightforward to run alongside your existing programme. Find out more about Deal Reg Incentives.
The honest benchmark
What a Working Deal Registration Process Looks Like
A deal registration process that reliably delivers partner pipeline visibility needs three things: it must be easy for partners to use, it must genuinely protect the partner who registers, and it must reward the behaviour you want to see. Most programmes have one of these. A few have two. The ones with all three have a pipeline they can actually trust.
Call it the Deal Reg Trust Triangle: easy to use, protected, and rewarded. Most programmes have one. A few have two. The ones with all three have a pipeline they can actually trust.
If you’re not there yet, it’s worth working out which of the three is missing, because the fix is different for each.
