The Pain and Necessity of Partner Briefings

For most of my career, I’ve worked in enterprise software, and working with partners was a necessity. Vlocity, where I was an initial employee and head of products, is the perfect case in point. We were purely a Salesforce ISV, and needed the big SIs to implement our solution — Salesforce and Accenture were even investors. We couldn’t operate without our partners.

Despite fully understanding the importance, I cringed every time I got roped into doing yet another partner briefing. Another PwC Senior Manager, another Salesforce team call, another Deloitte partner… same schtick, over and over. Most of them went nowhere.

Yet I knew there was no other way to do it. Those personas were never going to log into a portal, sit through a training video, or dredge through old decks to figure out whether we were a fit for their customer.

That’s probably why Forrester found that partner portal utilization “hovers… in the low teens.”

Our partners wanted a direct line to an expert, not a login, and they only wanted to talk about their specific customer. And we couldn’t afford not to give them that.

Because if we didn’t give partners confidence in the solution, make it easy to apply to their current situation, and assure them there was real economics in it for them, they would just move on. Focus elsewhere. Do something without us. We had to earn their trust and make it worth spending their client relationship capital.

Static content didn’t do it.

So the real question in partner enablement isn’t “how do we publish better partner materials?” It’s how do we help partners take what we know, what we sell, and what we’ve learned — and apply it to the customer situation in front of them.

At some point it hit me: partner enablement isn’t a content distribution problem. It’s a deal execution problem.

With AI, Enablement Can Actually Scale

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with a few companies on exactly this problem. One is a back-office application platform vendor with over a hundred modules and a pricing model that takes real expertise to navigate. Another is a cybersecurity company with some seriously advanced technology, right in the middle of an on-prem to cloud migration. Both offer a lot of sophistication — and require some sophistication to sell.

These companies needed their channel partners to really up-level, and to be able to deliver their value to customers without constant vendor hand-holding. Unlike my days of flying around to brief GSIs one by one, they needed something that could scale across hundreds of opportunities a month.

And honestly, this is a killer use case for AI. Not as a way to generate more content, but as a way to do what the human expert does: listen, interpret, synthesize, and apply.

That’s what led us to the idea of Partner Playbooks.

A partner playbook isn’t a training course, and it isn’t a portal. It’s a deal-specific guide that starts with the customer context and gives the partner something immediately useful — positioning for the actual competitive situation, product and pricing recommendations tied back to discovery, and the right customer stories and proof for that opportunity.

The simplest way I describe it is: instead of sending partners five decks and hoping they connect the dots, you give them one deal-specific playbook that tells them what matters, what to say, what to sell, and what to watch out for — and it updates as the deal evolves.

The important part is that it evolves. Deals change. New information comes in. Competitors emerge. Every time discovery deepens, the playbook updates, so the partner isn’t working from something stale.

And it’s interactive. Partners can ask questions in the moment — the way they always wanted to with a vendor expert — but in a way that’s scalable across the channel.

When I look back on my time at Vlocity, traveling 150,000 miles a year, countless late nights in middle seats and hotel rooms doing one more partner briefing to keep one more deal moving, I can’t help thinking this is exactly what we needed: a way to scale deal-time expertise into partner execution, without living on airplanes.

That’s what’s exciting to me about this shift.