5 Hard-Won Lessons in Partner Enablement

The fundamental truth about partner enablement most companies get wrong

Here's where I see leaders stumble time and time again. They'll tell you, “Our partners are an extension of our sales team.” Stop right there. That's your first red flag.

I've spent years figuring out the complex world of partner enablement. At Extreme Networks, we work with over 4,000 partner salespeople. I've learned that, to do channel enablement successfully, you have to understand the difference between the franchise and the value-add experience.

The franchise experience

When you walk into an Apple store, you might be dealing with a franchise partner, but you'd never know it. They wear the shirts, follow the pricing, and deliver the Apple experience. That's a franchise model – you control the experience.

The value-add experience

But most of us in B2B tech? We're operating in a value-add world. Our partners sell our products under their brand, as part of their solution. They're not an extension of our sales team – they're independent businesses with their own goals, challenges, and priorities.

This distinction isn't just semantics. It fundamentally changes how you should approach partner enablement.

Here are five lessons to help you do it well...

Lesson 1: They don't work for you (and that changes everything)

This is probably the most important thing I can share with you: your channel partners don't work for you. Sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed how often we act like this isn’t the case.

With your internal sales team, you've got all the levers – salary, compensation plans, forecasting methods, and a management hierarchy. If someone's not performing, you can coach, correct, or make changes.

With partners? You've got none of that. Unless you're in a franchise model with contractual penalties (and let's be honest, most of us aren't), your only real tool is motivation through mutual benefit.

That's why the business plan becomes your lifeline. Not some PowerPoint deck gathering dust on a shared drive, but a real, living document with agreed actions, milestones, and accountability.

Want to know if your channel team has their act together? Ask to see the partner business plans. If they scramble to pull together some slides, you've got work to do. If they show you a structured process with governance and regular reviews, you're in good shape.

Lesson 2: Your quality bar just got higher

Here's something that caught me off guard early in my career. That training video that's “good enough” for internal use? It won't cut it with partners.

When content goes external, it represents your brand in a way that internal sales enablement content doesn't. Those spelling mistakes you can laugh off with employees become credibility killers with partners. That product name change you forgot to update in the training? Partners will still remember it two years later.

Here’s a mistake to avoid that we learned this the hard way at Extreme Networks: We used to create content twice – once for internal use, recreating it at higher quality for partners. What a waste! Now, we create everything with partners in mind from day one. It forces us to maintain higher standards, but it also means we're not duplicating effort.

Partners have long memories. Very long memories. Tell them something's coming, and they'll ask about it a year or two later. Consistency isn't just nice to have – it's essential for maintaining trust.

Lesson 3: The siren song of quick wins

Every quarter-end, like clockwork, someone will suggest running a channel incentive. “Let's do a spiff!” they'll say. “Give away some iPads! Send the top performers to Hawaii!”

I'm going to tell you something that might be unpopular: these rarely work the way people think they do.

Don't get me wrong – I've run plenty of these programs. Sometimes you have to, especially when senior leadership is breathing down your neck for quarterly results. But here's what actually happens: you spend money, create some buzz, and mostly just reward partners who were going to sell your stuff anyway.

The real value of these programs? They make internal stakeholders feel like you're doing something. And sometimes, sure, that political capital is worth the investment.

But don't fool yourself into thinking tactical spiffs are actual strategy. Real partner enablement is a slow game. It's about building sustainable processes, consistent engagement, and long-term relationships. It's not as flashy as a trip to Vegas, but it does actually move the needle.

**Lesson 4: Win hearts and minds (just remember hearts last longer)**

When I talk about winning hearts and minds, I'm not being poetic. I'm being practical.

Winning minds is about logic – ROI, margins, market opportunity. Important stuff, but it only gets you so far. Winning hearts is about those moments when a partner salesperson is stuck, and someone from your team drops everything to help them win their first deal with your product.

At Extreme Networks, we're not the market leader. Cisco is. But Cisco's success has made them complacent. Their salespeople don't return calls quickly. They assume partners will wait. We don't have that luxury, so we've made responsiveness our superpower.

That salesperson who couldn't register a deal and you helped them navigate the system? They'll remember that for years. The partner who needed emergency support for a customer presentation and your team delivered? That's a relationship that transcends company loyalty.

You can't always program this into a formal process, but you can build a culture around it. Make “help them win their first deal” a mantra, not just a metric.

Lesson 5: Listen harder (silence is not golden)

Listening to your channel is harder than listening to your internal team. With employees, you've got regular touchpoints, mandated meetings, and formal feedback mechanisms. With partners, you have to work for it.

We run a Partner Advisory Council twice a year. What started as informal dinners has evolved into two-day sessions where our most important partners tell us exactly what we're doing wrong and what we need to fix. We make it worth their time – nice locations, exclusive access to product roadmaps, and (most importantly) we actually act on their feedback.

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Here's a counterintuitive truth: if your partners aren't complaining, you should be worried.

Partners who complain are invested. They see potential and want to help you realize it. Silent partners? They're either planning their exit or making so much money from the status quo that they don't want anything to change. Neither scenario is ideal for long-term growth.

The path forward

Channel enablement isn't just about extending your reach or reducing cost of sale, though those are nice benefits. It's about recognizing that you're not managing employees – you're orchestrating independent businesses toward a common goal.

Remember the fundamentals:

Remember they don't work for you
Raise your quality bar
Resist the quick-fix temptation
Build genuine relationships
Listen like your business depends on it (because it does)

Whether you're building a channel enablement strategy from scratch or inheriting one that needs work, these lessons will serve you well. They're not glamorous, and they won't produce overnight results. But they're real, they're tested, and they work.

The next time someone tells you the channel is just an extension of your sales team, you'll know better. And more importantly, you'll know what to do about it.

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5 hard-won lessons in partner enablement