Sand in the Gears

Partner motions take real investment on both sides. On the vendor side, it's program design, systems, comp. On the partner side, it's months of enablement and a willingness to put their own delivery team's reputation behind someone else's product. So it's a strange thing to watch a company spend all of that, then quietly build a comp plan or a customer offer that throws sand into its own gears.

I watched this happen twice, at the same company, a year apart, in two different functions. Neither time was anyone trying to undercut partners on purpose. Both times, the effect was the same.

The first time: services

Adoption wasn't much of a focus at that point. Sales was. The company had a bench of services-led partners, SIs and consultancies staffed to handle implementation work like setup and migrations, the kind of thing that gets more customers off to a strong start. At first, sellers had no real incentive either way, selling implementation services themselves or leaving that ground to a partner made no difference to their number.

Then the company built comp around its own implementation services, aimed at making sure the most strategic deals got hands-on support. The idea wasn't wrong. It just had no way to target the deals that needed it. Comp doesn't work in proportion to intent, it works in proportion to what it rewards, and a broad incentive got used where the plan needed a narrow one. Sellers now had a reason to sell the vendor's own delivery on every deal, not just the ones that needed it. The problem was that vendor services were priced at a premium, built to solve the most complex problems, not the defined, repetitive ones most customers actually had. So partners stopped getting considered, even when they were the better economic and practical fit. From time to time, this even reached into deals partners had sourced themselves. Plenty of customers were left to sort it out on their own.

The second time: customer success

A year later, a different function hit a version of the same problem from a different angle. Adoption still hadn't been a focus, and now customer health scores were lagging. That was a real problem, and Customer Success was right to go after it. They launched a new Customer Success-delivered offer, aimed at accounts where Professional Services might have been targeting work like a proper implementation or an integration with another solution.

Nobody in Customer Success was thinking about the partner motion, or about Professional Services for that matter. They were thinking about churn risk, and reasonably so, that's the job. But the offer landed on the same accounts where Professional Services could have been doing that work, and where partners could have been brought in again to reach a broader share of the customers who needed it. The comp team saw a new initiative and a real need to reduce churn, and built around it, without them. A real gap got a solo answer, even though the capacity to close it at scale already existed. Same pattern, different door.

What actually happened

Neither incident was partners (or Professional Services) losing a deal on merit. Both were the result of an internal incentive optimized in isolation, with nobody in the room checking whether it collided with work underway, or possible, elsewhere.

That's the part worth sitting with. Nobody sat down and decided to compete with the ecosystem. Sales comp got designed to hit a sales target. Customer Success got resourced to hit a retention target. Each decision made sense on its own terms. It's only zooming out that the collision becomes visible.

I don't know how common this exact setup is elsewhere, comp and CS offers landing on the same ground a year apart feels almost too clean, but I'd guess the underlying failure mode isn't rare: nobody checks whether a new incentive quietly recreates, or crowds out, work someone else could be doing.

Who actually pays for it

Company revenue doesn't necessarily take the visible hit. Growth numbers can look fine even while a motion loses altitude underneath them. The people who absorb the cost are more specific: the partner account manager caught between two people on the same account who didn't know they were competing until the conversation got awkward. The partner who suddenly finds themselves competing with the vendor's own sellers, sometimes on a deal they sourced, with no idea how it happened. The rep who never got a clear signal and just followed the comp plan, because that's what comp plans are for, then wondered why an economy car buyer wouldn't pay for the luxury car sale.

None of them made the decision. All of them live with it.

The actual fix isn't complicated

Not "give partners more credit" as a blanket rule, and not "never launch an internal offer that might overlap with anything." Simpler and more boring than that: before a new incentive, comp change, or customer-facing offer ships, someone checks whether it overlaps with work a partner or another internal team could be doing. Not as a veto. As a five-minute question, asked early enough to matter. And often the better answer to a real problem is a shared one: the offer built with Professional Services and partners, so it reaches more of the customers who need it.

That's the actual gap in both incidents above. Not malice, not strategy. Just an incentive shipped without anyone in the room whose job was to ask that question.