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

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 intent was targeted. The incentive wasn't: 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. Customer health scores were lagging, and the fix was a new Customer Success-delivered offer aimed at exactly the accounts where a services-led partner, or the company's own Professional Services team, might otherwise have stepped in or solved the challenge during implementation.

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 new offer overlapped with services work Professional Services and partners were already doing. The comp team saw a new initiative and a real need to reduce churn, and built around it, at the expense of both. 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 already underway 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 work that's already happening.

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 sourced the deal and finds a seller working it too, from the inside, with no idea that's what 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 lands on ground a partner or another internal team already occupies. Not as a veto. As a five-minute question, asked early enough to matter.

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.