Put a Chief Revenue Officer, a Chief Commercial Officer, or a VP of Alliances in front of me and ask how to get partners to execute on strategic initiatives, and the conversation almost always opens in the wrong place: motivation. Is the partner engaged. I hear this most at partner summits, partner advisory councils, alliance leadership sessions, and channel leadership forums, usually from route-to-market GMs and COOs watching a well-received initiative go quiet. My first question is never about motivation, it is about the ask itself: what, precisely, are we asking partners to do, and could one person inside that business act on it before lunch tomorrow, without asking anybody’s permission? Most of the time the answer is no, and once a leadership team sees that, the mystery mostly dissolves. I set out the wider pattern in my work on partner and ecosystem execution; this piece is the method for the first move.
Start With the Ask, Not the Motivation
Every partner leader I work with has, at some point, described a partner as uncommitted or slow to move. I understand the instinct: a partner that signed off and did nothing looks like a partner that never meant it. But the partner is running a business, not sitting inside yours, and nobody ignores something they genuinely agreed was worth doing for a whole working week. What usually happened is smaller: the ask had no obvious first step. Getting partners to move is rarely a willingness problem at the point of agreement, it is a design one, and the question that predicts execution is narrower than “are they committed”: what are we asking partners to do, this week?
Could One Person Act on This Before Lunch?
Here is the test I use before anything goes out to the channel. Take the ask as written, hand it to one person who actually works inside a partner’s business, a seller rather than an executive, and ask whether they could do something real with it before lunch tomorrow, using only what is already in front of them. Real means visible: a conversation started, a specific claim made out loud. Not “reviewed the materials.” A move.
If the answer is no, the ask is the wrong size, and no relationship or scorecard will fix that. This is the First 48 Hours applied as a design constraint rather than a diagnosis: most leaders use it after the fact, to check whether a decision was real. Applied before launch, it becomes a filter on the ask itself. If a partner cannot make a genuine, visible move within 48 hours of saying yes, we have designed a stall, and we will spend the next two quarters calling it a partner engagement problem.
An Adoption Program Is Not an Ask
Most initiatives fail this test because we rarely ask a partner to do one thing. We ask them to adopt a program: change an internal process, retrain a team, update a system, secure sign-off from someone who was not in the room when we agreed this made sense. That is not an ask, it is a project, and we are asking the partner to fund it from their own capacity for a return that belongs partly to us.
Seen from the partner’s side, being slow about this is reasonable, not a character flaw: a request that requires internal investment before it produces anything queues behind requests that do not. This is what I mean by Borrowed Priority: it is what you have when a partner has genuinely agreed to your initiative but is running it on your priority rather than their own, so it moves while you are pushing and stops the moment you look away. The fix is a smaller first ask that does not require the partner to fund anything first.
One Name on Each Side of the Boundary
Shrinking the ask only works if someone is actually holding it, and “the partner team” is not a person. Every initiative I have watched move cleanly through a channel had one name on each side of the handoff, not a role: not “someone in partner marketing,” a name, reachable directly, who agreed to the first move and knows it is theirs. Most channel leaders skip this because it feels unnecessary once a partner executive has already said yes at the top. It is not: an initiative with no named owner inside the partner organisation defaults to whoever has spare capacity, usually nobody. Naming your own owner matters just as much; partner-led growth execution breaks down as often from an unclear owner on your side as theirs.
Make the First Move a Customer Conversation, Not a Portal Update
The size of the ask matters, but so does its shape. A first move that lives inside a portal or a deal registration form is invisible to the part of the partner’s business that actually moves revenue: the sellers. It gets filed and forgotten. The first move that produces channel strategy execution is one a partner seller makes with a customer: a specific line raised this week, not a form completed in the back office. It is smaller, faster, and produces a result the partner can see immediately, which makes a second move likely. Portal steps belong later, not as the first thing you ask.
What Has to Be Possible in the First 48 Hours?
I think of this as the seventeen page ask. A strategic initiative goes out to the channel as a comprehensive partner pack: seventeen pages, six new process steps, a certification requirement, a change to deal registration, and a new portal workflow. Every partner principal who reads it agrees it makes sense. Nobody starts. The smallest possible first step, traced through, takes three weeks of internal work inside the partner’s own business and needs sign-off from somebody who was never in the room when the initiative was agreed.
Set that against the one-line version: a specific thing a partner seller could say to a specific customer this week, with nothing to configure and nobody’s permission required. Most of the seventeen pages were not written for the partner at all; they were the vendor organising itself, dressed up as enablement. Fair to build, but not the ask, and sending it as the ask is how a genuinely good initiative goes quiet. Eight weeks later, the channel manager who owns it is in front of a leadership team explaining why nothing has started, and the sentence that comes out is some version of: “they all agreed it was a good idea.” That sentence is the tell. Agreement was never the problem; nobody had designed something a partner could start.
Reviewing Movement Instead of Reviewing the Plan
Once the ask is the right size and both owners are named, the only remaining discipline is a short, frequent, two-sided conversation about what actually moved, not a review of the plan agreed to a month ago: what would a customer have noticed this week?
What the First Two Weeks Should Look Like
In the first two weeks after a partner says yes, I want to see three things: the first move made and visible, the named owner on each side confirmed by what they actually did rather than their title, and a second move already in motion. If none of the three has happened by day fourteen, the ask was too large, not the partner too slow, and the right response is to shrink it again, not escalate it.
Getting partners to move on strategic initiatives is less about persuasion and more about designing something the business can actually start. Transaction cost economics has long explained why an agreement between two separate businesses does not, on its own, produce coordinated action (Oliver Williamson, “The Economics of Organisation: The Transaction Cost Approach,” American Journal of Sociology); the friction sits in the gap between what was agreed and what one named person can do on one named day. Treat that friction as structural rather than personal, and the work shifts from chasing commitment to designing the first move.
If your channel is full of partners who agreed and then went quiet, the size and shape of the ask is where I would start. The next piece in this series covers partners who are moving but have not made your iwnitiative their own: getting partners to prioritise your initiatives. If you are planning a partner summit, alliance leadership session, or enablement week and want this argument made to the room, I speak on it: see partner and ecosystem execution keynote speaker, or check dates and availability.
