Looking back: April 2026
I’ve been through multiple channel partnerships over the course of my career — both as a vendor managing a channel and as an observer of companies that did. The moment I most clearly remember — the one that rewired how I think about channel health — was a specific Tuesday afternoon, in a specific meeting, when I realized a partnership I’d been running for almost two years had been dead for at least eight months without my noticing.
The Setup
The channel in question was a distribution partnership — our product going to market through a partner’s sales motion, revenue shared according to a written agreement, with joint pipeline reviews scheduled quarterly.
On paper, everything was fine. We had joint customers. We had a contract. We had quarterly reviews. Revenue had plateaued but not dropped, which I’d attributed to natural maturation of the relationship.
What I hadn’t noticed was that every one of those “normal” signals had been deteriorating for months. The joint customer base wasn’t growing. The quarterly reviews had become increasingly perfunctory. The specific contacts I’d been working with at the partner had rotated out, and the new ones didn’t know me or care about the partnership in any meaningful way.
Revenue was flat, which in a growth environment is actually decline. But flat revenue doesn’t trigger alarms in most organizations the way declining revenue does, so I hadn’t been alerted.
The Meeting
The Tuesday that clarified things was a routine quarterly review. I walked in expecting the usual: pipeline update, a review of joint customers, a light discussion of what was coming next.
The partner’s new regional head — who I’d met once, briefly — opened by saying: “I want to be direct with you. This partnership doesn’t have an operator on our side anymore. The person who championed it is gone. I’m inheriting it without context, and frankly, I’m not sure what it’s for. Can you walk me through what success would look like from your perspective?”
I couldn’t.
Not because I didn’t know what success looked like in theory. I knew that. I couldn’t walk him through it because, on reflection, the partnership hadn’t been set up with kill criteria, hadn’t been rebuilt when the original champion left, and hadn’t had a real operating motion for many months. It had been running on momentum from a past era, and I’d been managing the appearance rather than the substance.
The meeting was cordial. We agreed to reassess. Within 90 days, we wound it down formally.
What I Should Have Seen Earlier
Several signals had been present that I’d either missed or rationalized:
The original champion left, and we didn’t replace the relationship.
Six months before the Tuesday meeting, my primary contact at the partner had moved to another role. The handoff had been brief. The new contact didn’t have the same investment. I noticed at the time but assumed the relationship would rebuild naturally. It didn’t.
The meetings got thinner but we kept holding them.
The quarterly reviews had been degrading in substance. Earlier ones had real discussion of pipeline, roadmap, customer issues. Later ones were status reports with no decisions attached. I’d read the drift as normal evolution rather than as a warning sign.
Revenue was flat in a growth market.
In hindsight, this was the clearest signal. Both companies had been growing during the relevant period. The partnership’s contribution had not. That delta — partnership growth vs. organic growth — was negative, even though the absolute number was flat. I hadn’t looked at the comparison that way until much later.
The partner had stopped volunteering opportunities.
Earlier in the partnership, the partner had brought deals to us regularly. By the time of the Tuesday meeting, all the “joint deals” were deals we’d brought to them. The flow had reversed without my noticing.
The Lesson That Generalized
After that experience, I developed a more rigorous framework for evaluating any channel or partnership I was running:
1. Operator continuity on both sides.
If the original operator left and hasn’t been replaced with someone who has real investment, the partnership is at risk. This is the most reliable leading indicator I’ve found.
2. Growth contribution delta.
Not absolute revenue — revenue growth relative to organic growth in the same period. Partnerships that aren’t accelerating above baseline are decelerating, even if the absolute number looks stable.
3. Bilateral deal flow.
Real partnerships have deals flowing in both directions. When one side stops volunteering opportunities, the relationship has shifted from partnership to vendor-provider, even if both sides still call it a partnership.
4. Meeting substance.
If the quarterly review has become a status report instead of a working session, the partnership has declined. Meeting substance is a leading indicator; revenue decline is a lagging one.
What I Do Differently Now
Every channel or partnership I’m involved in now has a quarterly health check that explicitly reviews those four signals. The goal isn’t to prevent partnerships from ever declining — that’s unrealistic. It’s to catch the decline early, while there’s still time to reset or wind down deliberately.
The Tuesday meeting taught me that partnerships can die without dying. They can continue generating just enough activity to mask the underlying deterioration, and the activity itself becomes the problem — because it convinces both sides there’s still something there when there isn’t.
The antidote is specific, structured health checks. Signals that matter. Thresholds that trigger action. Kill criteria written before the relationship needs them.
If you’re running a channel or partnership that hasn’t had a real health check in a while, schedule one. Ask the four questions honestly. You might find everything is fine. You might find what I found, which is that the relationship has been dead longer than you realized.
Better to know. The Tuesday I realized my channel was broken was one of the more important Tuesdays of my professional life.