Before I would sign a reseller or systems integrator agreement, I want to know how one salesperson at that partner gets paid when my product is in the deal.
The agreement covers margin, territory, deal registration, marketing funds, and termination. None of those terms necessarily changes the plan used by the person who decides which products go into a customer meeting on Tuesday. That person works from a quota, a payout schedule, a set of accelerators, and sometimes an annual award trip. If the product appears in none of them, the launch may end at a logo slide.
So the questions are narrow. Does the full contract value retire quota, or only the partner’s margin on my line? Does the credit land in the account rep’s number or in an overlay team’s number? Is the commission paid at booking or at customer acceptance? Is there a house product in the same catalog carrying a better rate? Has the plan year already been set? If it has, ask what can change seller behavior before the next one. Without a named exception or incentive, time the launch to the partner’s planning calendar rather than to my board meeting.
Services partners need a different question: does the product add billable hours or remove them? A practice leader carrying a utilization target has reason to favor software that needs configuration, data migration, tuning, and a managed service wrapper. For a practice paid by the hour, a pitch that compresses a six-week integration into three days also threatens services revenue. The model can still work, but the replacement needs to be explicit: a managed service SKU the partner owns or a fixed-fee implementation with margin it keeps. Without one, the practice may praise the product and staff another project.
Before funding a channel team, I want the specifics on paper: the SKU in the partner’s catalog, the quota retirement rate, how many sellers carry it in their plan and in which segment, how the overlay specialists assigned to it are measured, and what the executive sponsor’s own number depends on. If the sponsor’s compensation has nothing to do with the category, treat the introduction as access rather than distribution.
Reporting needs the same distinction. Partner-sourced should mean the partner found the customer and brought us in. Partner-influenced should identify a concrete partner action that advanced an opportunity we already had: an introduction to a decision-maker, account context, technical validation, or help through a stalled step. A transaction through an existing purchasing vehicle belongs in a third bucket. Sourced pipeline shows new distribution. Influence may accelerate a deal. The third bucket is fulfillment. Combining them hides whether the channel is producing demand, helping sales, or processing paper.
When we source deals for the partner to earn attention from its sellers, we are paying margin for work we performed. Call that a procurement arrangement and price it accordingly. Give one person responsibility for the comp plan and planning cycle, then add headcount when the product shows up in someone’s quota.