Finding traction in partnerships: A field guide for executives

Most companies treat partnerships as a channel to staff and a relationship to manage. The results are predictable: a growing partner count, a shrinking revenue contribution, and a leadership team quietly wondering what they are paying for.Finding Traction in Partnerships argues for a different starting point. Partnerships is a commercial operating system. It requires strategy, program design, go-to-market integration, incentives, operations, governance, and leadership moving in one direction at the same time. When those components are misaligned (and they usually are), the function produces motion without outcome.This book is a practitioner's guide to building that system. Not the theory of why partnerships matter. Not relationship skills for partner managers. The operating model itself: the components, how they interlock, where they typically break, and the executive decisions that determine whether the function scales or stalls.Topics include:Designing a partner operating model that connects strategy to field behaviorWhat co-sell actually requires, and why most implementations fail at the incentives layerMeasuring partnerships in terms of revenue contribution and leverage, not activityThe executive decisions that partnerships functions cannot make for themselvesDiagnosing and rebuilding a program that has accumulated motion without commercial outcomeWritten for C-level and VP-level leaders who own the revenue number partnerships contributes to, or who approved the investment and need it to produce.