Your channel sells what is easiest to sell. Make it you: current content kits, co-marketing plays, and a cadence partners feel.
Distributors carry forty line cards and sell whatever the customer asks for, or whatever is freshest in their memory. Your products sit in their catalog with a price and a part number while the supplier who shows up with stories, kits, and campaigns gets mentioned first.
Your channel sells what is easiest to sell. Make it you: current content kits, co-marketing plays, and a cadence partners feel. Built once, documented in your standard work, and run by your own team week after week.
A partner channel multiplies salespeople you do not pay, but only if they can sell your story without you in the room. This playbook arms them: content kits that make recommending you effortless, co-marketing plays that build pipeline together, and a cadence that keeps you the freshest name on the line card.
of a B2B buying group's total buying time is spent meeting with potential suppliers. In a channel business, much of the rest plays out at a partner's counter and inside a partner's spec. The kit decides what gets said there.
At any given time roughly 95% of your category's buyers are not in market, but they reorder, call counters, and read spec drawings every week. Your channel is what carries your position between purchases, if you arm it.
A channel left unarmed does not stay neutral. Every quarter the kit does not exist, the same five things quietly happen.
The Proximity Audit scores how your channel presents you today and what that silence costs in sourced deals. That is the point of starting there.
An install only sticks when it has owners. Here is who this playbook belongs to inside your company, and what each of them walks away with.
The owner or VP who owns channel revenue and suspects it is underperforming.
OutcomeA channel that sources deals instead of only fulfilling them, with a scorecard to prove it.
Your marketing lead, who builds the kit, the plays, and the brief from assets you already own.
OutcomeA partner kit assembled in weeks, not quarters, and a rhythm that runs itself.
The sales manager who holds the partner relationships and makes every partner call.
OutcomeA reason to call partners that is not a quota conversation.
The friendliest counter or integrator contact, recruited to test the kit.
OutcomeMaterial that makes their job easier, and first look at every launch.
An illustrative composite drawn from real engagement patterns. Company details invented; the shape of the change is the point.
Kit architecture, play design, and the cadence.
Partner relationships and delivery.
Partner-sourced opportunities and kit usage.
Partners sell whatever is easiest to sell. Each week hands the channel something finished that the next week puts to work, so the sequence is fixed and the scope is too.
Every partner mapped by volume and influence, with a deal behind every claim; three to five focus partners picked.
Why firstBespoke investment only pays on partners who shape specs and recommendations. Evidence makes the picks, not warmth.
Six finished pieces per focus partner, adapted from assets you already own. Zero partner writing. One real partner tests it.
Why before playsA partner cannot run a play empty-handed. The kit is the payload every later move delivers to the counter and the spec.
Three play cards: what we bring, what the partner brings, what the partner gets, capped in hours. First play scheduled.
Why nowKits sit on shelves until something moves them. A play with a named partner payoff puts the kit to work in the field.
The launch relay: package four weeks out, embargo briefing two weeks out, launch week together, follow-through after.
Why before the rhythmPartners who hear it before customers sell it first. The relay makes early briefing a calendar, not an occasional favor.
The monthly one-page brief: named sender, fixed day, three standing sections, one feedback question. Issue zero ships.
Why nowKits, plays, and launches decay without a metronome. One page a month keeps your story in partner hands between the big moments.
The partner scorecard: kit usage and sourced opportunities. Tiers set by your decision-maker. The Partner Enablement Manual assembled and owned.
Why lastInvestment follows evidence. The scorecard is what moves tiers and budgets after the install ends.
Kit usage per focus partner, with evidence; partner-sourced opportunities counted by name; the rhythm checked.
Why it mattersUsage proves the kit lands; sourcing proves the channel sells instead of only fulfilling. Two numbers decide the case.
Every week compiles into the Partner Enablement Manual: the named product your team owns, reruns, and defends long after the install ends.
This playbook lives in System 05: Expand, the part of the method that answers one question: Where does revenue actually happen? Most companies install it alongside one or two related playbooks in a 90-Day Install.
Share this page with your leadership team. If it names your problem, the Proximity Audit will tell you whether this playbook should be your first install or your third.
Installed on one product line first, then yours to rerun across every line you own. Not sure it's the right first move? Start with the Proximity Audit ($7,500, credited toward an install): all fifteen areas scored and a ranked roadmap.
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