What is a channel or reseller partnership, and how do they work?
Selling through someone else's sales relationships rather than your own — and the reason businesses do it is reach, while the reason it so frequently disappoints is that the partner's incentives are rarely as aligned as the contract implies.
The models, which differ substantially:
Referral. The partner introduces prospects and you close and deliver, paying a commission. Lowest commitment on both sides, and the easiest to start.
Reseller. The partner buys from you at a discount and sells on at their own price, owning the customer relationship and usually first-line support.
Distributor. Sells to resellers rather than end customers, adding logistics, credit and breadth — used where the partner network is too large to manage directly.
White label or OEM. Your product is sold under their brand, and the customer may never know you exist.
Integration or technology partnership, where products work together and each side introduces the other.
Agency, where they sell in your name — which carries legal consequences including, in some jurisdictions, compensation payable on termination under commercial agency regulations. This is a genuine trap for businesses that assume termination is free.
Why partnerships underperform:
The partner has other products. Yours competes for attention with everything else they sell, and you are usually not their priority.
Enablement is underestimated. Partners need training, materials, demo access, pricing clarity and support — signing the agreement is the start of the work, not the end, and treating it as the end is the commonest failure.
Channel conflict, where your direct sales team competes with the partner for the same customer. Rules of engagement and deal registration exist specifically to prevent this, and their absence poisons the relationship quickly.
Margin stacking, where the partner's margin makes the end price uncompetitive.
Loss of customer contact, so you learn nothing about how the product performs.
What actually makes it work: a small number of committed partners rather than many nominal ones; clear deal registration; a named person on each side; realistic ramp expectations measured in quarters; and measuring partner-sourced pipeline rather than partner count.