A channel director told me recently that she had found out, almost by accident, that a seven-figure renewal in her patch had been shaped from day one by an ISV her own team had never spoken to. The reseller closed it. The vendor took the credit internally. The ISV, who had recommended the platform to the customer eighteen months earlier because it plugged into their own product, got nothing.
If you run a channel incentive program, you have probably got a version of this story sitting somewhere in your pipeline right now. You just do not know it yet, because your program was never built to see it.
The channel has a whole layer you’re not paying
According to Jay McBain, Omdia’s chief analyst for channels, partnerships and ecosystems, about 80% of the average technology vendor’s partner ecosystem now influences deals without ever transacting one. Two groups do most of that work.
The consultant, who scopes the requirement with the end user long before procurement gets involved, and recommends a vendor because it genuinely supports the business or project goal they have been hired to deliver. A lot of them are one-man bands, ex-vendor or ex-reseller people who went solo and took deep sector knowledge with them.
The ISV, whose software works well with or integrates with a vendor’s product, and who recommends that vendor to their own customers because the two solutions together make a proven fix. They are not selling your licence. They are selling theirs.
McBain calls the modern channel trifurcated: partners who influence pre-sale, partners who transact, and partners who retain post-sale. Influence is now the biggest of the three, and it is the one most incentive programs still cannot see.
A few vendors have actually built for this
Microsoft attributes 96% of its sales as partner-assisted, and its CPOR incentive pays a partner for pre-sales influence even when a completely different partner closes the deal.
Zebra Technologies has gone further. Its PartnerConnect program includes a Complementary Partner community, built specifically for partners who “influence the sale of our products and services, but typically do not resell” them. There is an Independent Software Vendor Track live today, with Independent Hardware Vendor, Consultant and System Integrator tracks in the pipeline. The mechanic behind it, Influence Registration, works a lot like deal reg: an ISV registers the opportunity, earns a fixed reward if it closes, and the reseller who is actually delivering the deal still earns their normal margin on top. Two different partners, two different payouts, one deal.
Omdia’s research puts the average enterprise deal at seven partners touching it before signature. McBain expects that to hit seventeen within a few years, as AI and modularity fragment the expertise a buyer needs.
What to actually do with this
Start with your last ten closed deals. Work out who touched each one before your sales team got involved, then check how many of those names are actually in your partner program. My guess is not many.
Then look at how you would pay them if they were. A reseller org can wait for a quarterly rebate run. A solo consultant who scoped your deal eighteen months ago cannot, and should not have to. If your reward mechanism assumes a company with a finance department on the other end, it is already excluding most of the people you are trying to reach. Real-time, multi-currency payouts that land directly with an individual, not routed through a partner org that may or may not pass it on, are the kind of infrastructure this layer of the channel actually needs. It is a big part of why we built Incentivizer® the way we did.
If your program still has one shape, reseller in, reward out, it is built for a channel that is already a fifth of what it used to be. Time to fix that before a competitor does.
See how Incentivizer® handles influence registration and deal reg in one platform. Explore deal registration.