One of the most common questions I get asked when working with partner ecosystem leaders is some version of: how do we go about getting partners to prioritise our initiatives? I hear it from CROs and Chief Commercial Officers, VPs and Directors of Partnerships, Alliances and Channel, route-to-market GMs and CEOs and COOs of partner-led businesses, usually on the way out of a partner summit, a partner advisory council, or an executive session on route to market, where every partner in the room has just agreed, again, that this quarter’s initiative matters.

There’s a word in that question worth slowing down. “Prioritise” assumes the partner already has a list, with your initiative on it, sitting too low. Usually your initiative isn’t on the list at all, and what you’re actually asking for is entry, not promotion. I’ve written elsewhere about the mechanics of why agreement stalls at this boundary, in the pillar article on partner ecosystem execution; this piece stays on one part of it, the partner’s own priority stack, and what an honest trade looks like.

You Are Asking for Entry, Not Promotion

The frustration behind that question is genuine, and it’s usually aimed at the wrong target. “They agreed to this and they’re still not moving” treats the gap as a broken promise. It’s closer to what I call Borrowed Priority: the partner has genuinely agreed to your initiative but is running it on your priority list rather than their own, so it moves while you’re pushing and stops the moment you look away. That’s a placement problem, not a motivation problem. A partner principal is allocating finite people against whatever matters most to their own numbers, and agreement in the meeting was never the allocation.

What Is Actually on a Partner’s List This Quarter

It helps to write the list out honestly, in the partner’s order rather than yours. A principal I think of as typical, a composite of the ones I’ve sat across from, would have something like this on their desk: their own services margin. A delivery hiring gap they can’t fill fast enough. A renewal book with accounts genuinely at risk. A larger vendor’s rebate landing in about six weeks. Two other vendors’ programs, each with a quarterly incentive attached. And then, at number seven, you.

That’s not an insult, it’s arithmetic performed by someone running a business. The seventh item tells you where you currently rank, not where you deserve to. The useful question isn’t why won’t they move it up. It’s what would have to be true for us to be third instead of seventh, and are we willing to make it true.

Competing Vendor Relationships Are Not Disloyalty

It’s tempting, seeing two other vendors’ names higher on that list, to read it as a loyalty problem. I’d push back on that every time. A partner who only carried your line would be a subsidiary, not a partner, and neither of you would want that risk. The competing relationships are the reason the partner exists as an independent business at all.

Once you accept that, the incentive programs sitting above you on the list stop looking like betrayals and start looking like data: what currency actually moves this partner’s business this quarter, and how much of it is already on the table from someone else. That’s the starting point for working out what you’d need to offer to be worth the same attention.

You Cannot Buy Commitment. You Can Buy Behaviour.

Commitment isn’t what you’re short of, and it isn’t what you need. You already have it; it’s in the transcript of every quarterly business review this year. What you’re short of is behaviour, and behaviour doesn’t follow commitment; it follows whatever is currently worth more to the person deciding where to spend the next hour. Chasing behaviour means asking what would have to move for this to be worth more than the seventh item, then either making that true or adjusting your expectations rather than your language.

Priority Is Subtraction: What Did This Push Down?

There’s a question that cuts through faster than “are you committed to this,” which everyone answers yes to. The question is: what did this push down? If a partner has genuinely prioritised your initiative, something else in their business has to visibly get less, within about 48 hours of that decision being real: a seller’s time, a marketing slot, a delivery resource, attention in the partner’s own pipeline review. Priority has always worked this way; it’s subtraction, not addition, because nobody’s week grows to make room. If nothing was visibly displaced, nothing was actually prioritised, whatever was said in the room. When a channel leader can’t name what pushed down, the initiative is sitting alongside everything else, which is another way of saying it isn’t really anywhere.

Three Honest Moves, and One Dishonest One

Once behaviour follows worth, there are only three honest moves. Make the initiative worth more to the partner: better margin, earlier access to something scarce, capacity you help fund, a customer relationship they get to keep. Make it cost less to start, a design question about the shape of the ask itself. Or accept that you’re asking for a favour rather than offering a trade, and price it accordingly.

The dishonest move is asking for the behaviour of a top-three priority while offering the economics of a number seven, then calling the inaction an engagement problem or a culture problem. It’s neither. It’s a mismatch between the ask and the offer, and no amount of relationship management closes a gap that was never about the relationship.

What Does the Ecosystem Cost, and What Is It Returning?

Underneath most of these conversations sits a harder question that rarely gets asked directly: what is the ecosystem investment actually returning, and how would we know. Program spend, enablement time, rebate structures, dedicated channel headcount, all of it is real cost, and few organisations I’ve worked with can put an honest, current answer next to it, because the reporting available tends to describe the health of the relationship, not the movement of the outcome it was meant to produce.

This is one of the places an outside voice earns its place in the room. A channel leader who raises this question internally is often heard as building a case to cut something, which changes how honestly the room can answer. When someone from outside asks the first question, plainly, in front of the vendor’s leadership and the partners who carry the volume, it’s just a question, and the room can engage with it rather than defend against it. That’s a good part of what I get asked to do at partner summits and route-to-market executive sessions: not to hand anyone a number, but to make it safe to ask where the return actually is. See what that session can look like.

Asking for a Favour Is Fine, as Long as You Say So

None of this argues against ever asking for something you can’t fully justify in margin or access. Favours are normal in any working relationship worth having. The failure isn’t asking for one, it’s calling it a partnership obligation, then being surprised when it gets the priority a favour gets rather than the priority an obligation would. Say what it actually is. Ask for less than you would if you were paying for it properly, and say thank you in a way the partner’s people notice, not just the principal. That’s the difference between a relationship that can call in a genuine favour again next quarter, and one that’s spent its credit asking for full commitment at favour prices.

One related question is worth naming rather than answering here: once the trade is honest, who decides when its terms need to change again, given the partner’s business and yours run on different incentives. I take that up in the piece on who decides when the terms of the trade have to change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic study of how alliances are actually managed, “Collaborative Advantage: The Art of Alliances,” published in Harvard Business Review, makes a point worth keeping close: the alliances that hold are the ones both sides keep actively investing in, not the ones with the best contract. A priority list is one honest place that investment shows up, or doesn’t.

If you’re preparing a partner summit, an advisory council, or an executive session on route to market and want the room to leave with a straighter answer to where this initiative actually sits, check availability here.