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Executive Turnover and Proving the Value of Partnerships

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, partnerships remain a critical component of go-to-market strategies. Yet, despite their potential for growth and competitive differentiation, many organizations are experiencing a disconnect between their stated commitment to partnerships and the actual investment in partner programs. The result? High turnover among partnering executives and an increasing demand to prove the tangible value of partnerships.

Change management is leading to sleepless nights. More than 80% of the attendees at our last partner programs roundtable indicated it’s keeping them up at night (yowza). After two decades of partnership model and program consulting experience, we’ve seen all the warning signs of failure. Without organizational change management, your new program, compensation plan, or portal initiative is pretty much worth the paper it’s printed on.

Deciding how to tackle sales compensation is no easy task.

A participant in our recent partnering executive roundtable asked the group: “Are you in favor of or opposed to creating compensation neutrality for your direct field team?” Without missing a beat (and to my surprise), almost half of the roundtable participants said they were against ‘comp’ neutrality. How could anyone be against something with the word “neutral” in it? If you’re not familiar with the term, compensation neutrality means a salesperson gets paid, or their sales quota is retired, at the same rate if the product is sold by a partner or themselves. How compensation is defined for your direct sales force can help or hinder your partnering efforts and there’s no clear consensus on the right answer.