You have partners.
Why isn’t the channel producing?
Partners can sign, train, bring opportunities and still never become a meaningful growth engine.
The reason is rarely as simple as “the partners aren’t good enough.”
I help B2B software companies find where the partner business is actually breaking, then fix it with them.
It usually shows up like this.
Different symptoms. Different causes.
Partner underperformance is a symptom.
It is not a diagnosis.
Sometimes the partner is the problem.
But just as often, the issue is somewhere else.
- The economics are not strong enough to earn real partner investment.
- The right partners were never recruited.
- The value is hard to explain or hard to sell.
- The first deal is too difficult.
- The partner can sell but cannot scope or deliver.
- Support is too hard to navigate.
- The product creates too much friction.
- Or the vendor itself has built a partner model that looks complete on paper but does not work in the field.
Before fixing anything, you need to know what is actually broken.
And in agentic AI, the same problems get harder because more of the work moves into discovery, scoping, deployment, integration, adoption and trust.
I built partner businesses from the inside.
I spent more than 20 years inside the SAP Business One ecosystem, from SAP itself to building partner success and enablement at Boyum IT, and later building partner infrastructure from zero for an agentic AI company.
I have seen partner businesses at the beginning, at scale, and when they stop working.
To find the break, I look at both sides of the partner business.
Vendor → Partner describes how the vendor develops and progresses the partner relationship/business.
Partner → Customer describes the capability the partner needs to take a customer successfully through the journey.
The break can sit almost anywhere.
Is the opportunity valuable enough for a good partner to invest people, time and reputation in it?
Did you recruit partners who actually have the customers, capability and business model to succeed?
Is there a clear reason for customers to buy and for partners to lead with it?
Can they discover, sell, scope, implement and support without guessing their way through it?
Are pricing, process, ownership, handoffs, tools and escalation paths helping the partner move or slowing them down?
Is the product actually strong enough, usable enough and supportable enough for a partner to build a reputation around it?
Are sales, product, support, marketing and the partner team helping the same motion or pulling in different directions?
That is why I do not start with the solution.
I start by finding the break.
Three ways in, depending on what you already know.
Diagnose what is actually breaking
I look at the motion end to end, talk to your team and your partners, and separate symptoms from causes.
You leave with a clear view of where the problem actually sits and what to fix first.
Build what is missing
Onboarding. Enablement. Partner economics. Sales assets. Demo flow. Deployment guidance. Support structure. Commercial model. Operating cadence.
We build the pieces the partner business actually needs, in the order they are needed.
Work through execution
I stay in the work.
Partner calls. Early opportunities. First deployments. Assets that need rewriting after partners use them. Processes that looked right on paper and fail in real life.
This is execution alongside your team, not a strategy deck and a handover.
Build what the next partners need.
Learn before you scale.
I do not start by building the full partner machine.
I start with the partners and opportunities you already have.
Lean, but not improvised.
AI changes where the partner business gets hard.
The stages do not disappear.
But more of the work moves into discovery, scoping, deployment, integration, adoption and trust.
- More repeatable product story
- Defined feature set
- Known implementation patterns
- Established support cases
- Value often clear before deployment
- Workflow discovery before the solution is fully defined
- More customer-specific design
- Data and integration work
- Iterative deployment instead of one go-live
- Adoption and trust determine whether the solution survives
- Partners need a business model around the work, not just margin on a licence
If the partner cannot turn that complexity into a repeatable business, recruitment and training will not fix the channel.
A partner cannot build a practice around a product they cannot sell, deliver and make profitable repeatedly.
What that looked like at Boyum IT.
I built the partner success and enablement function at Boyum IT from the point where it did not exist to an ecosystem of 800+ partners and 8,000+ customers.
“Deep understanding of the end customers' and partners' challenges/pain points.”
Christoffer HoltenLinkedIn recommendation
Not sure where your partner business is breaking?
The Partner Readiness Assessment gives you a structured first look.
It looks across business and product readiness, strategic readiness and operational readiness, then shows which areas are most likely holding the others back.
Where this comes from.
I have spent my career inside partner organisations rather than advising them from outside.
I started inside SAP Business One, working directly with partners across technical support, pre-sales, post-sales and growth.
At Boyum IT, I helped build the partner engine behind an ecosystem of more than 800 partners and 8,000 customers.
More recently, I built partner infrastructure from zero inside an agentic AI company.
I know what a partner model looks like in a strategy presentation.
More importantly, I know what happens when real partners have to sell it, deliver it and make money from it.