Point of View
Revenue Channels · Go-to-Market · Partner Ecosystems
The Channel You'd Build Today Isn't the One You're Running
Most channel programs have never been redesigned from the ground up. Run the exercise honestly — start from actual TAM and the share you actually want, design down from there — and the program that falls out typically looks meaningfully different from the one currently running. That gap is market share sitting on the table.
Jan 2026
Points of View is Vaxa's opinion column. Each article states a position on a question where reasonable people disagree — and makes the argument for that position directly.
VAXA POINT OF VIEW
Most channel programs have never been redesigned from the ground up. They were built once, for a market and a strategy that existed at the time, and every year since has been incremental patching — a new incentive tier here, a portal update there — layered on a foundation nobody has revisited.
Run the exercise honestly — start from actual TAM, the share you actually want, and design down from there — and the channel program that falls out typically looks meaningfully different from the one currently running. The gap between the two isn't a rounding error. It's market share sitting on the table because rebuilding is harder than patching, and patching is what's been happening for years.
Pattern
The scale of what's riding on channel makes the neglect harder to justify. Partner-delivered technology and services account for more than 70% of global IT spend, and partner ecosystems are projected to drive roughly $80 trillion in annual global revenue by 2030 — close to a third of total global economic output flowing through indirect channels rather than direct sales. For B2B organizations specifically, three-quarters of transactions now move through channel partners rather than direct relationships. This isn't a secondary go-to-market motion for most technology companies. It's the primary one.
Despite that scale, channel programs are rarely treated with the same design rigor as a company's core product or pricing strategy. Research on partner ecosystems this year found that partners rank "ease of doing business" — clean deal registration, simple conflict resolution, functional portals — above raw revenue and profit incentives as the thing that actually determines their engagement. That's a tell: partners aren't complaining that the incentives are wrong. They're complaining that the operational architecture around those incentives is cumbersome, because it was built for a partner base and a deal flow that existed years ago and has been added to, not redesigned, ever since.
Inertia
The scale of what's riding on channel makes the neglect harder to justify. Partner-delivered technology and services account for more than 70% of global IT spend, and partner ecosystems are projected to drive roughly $80 trillion in annual global revenue by 2030 — close to a third of total global economic output flowing through indirect channels rather than direct sales. For B2B organizations specifically, three-quarters of transactions now move through channel partners rather than direct relationships. This isn't a secondary go-to-market motion for most technology companies. It's the primary one.
Despite that scale, channel programs are rarely treated with the same design rigor as a company's core product or pricing strategy. Research on partner ecosystems this year found that partners rank "ease of doing business" — clean deal registration, simple conflict resolution, functional portals — above raw revenue and profit incentives as the thing that actually determines their engagement. That's a tell: partners aren't complaining that the incentives are wrong. They're complaining that the operational architecture around those incentives is cumbersome, because it was built for a partner base and a deal flow that existed years ago and has been added to, not redesigned, ever since.
A channel program is a frozen snapshot of a TAM and a market-share ambition that existed the last time someone seriously redesigned it — and for most organizations, that was years ago.
Evidence
The magnitude of the gap shows up wherever organizations have actually run the exercise. Research on partner program maturity finds that mature, well-structured partner programs drive roughly double the revenue growth of immature ones and can contribute up to 28% of total company revenue — a figure most organizations with an aging channel program are nowhere near, not because their market opportunity is smaller, but because their program architecture hasn't kept pace with it. The same research shows a sharp divide in enablement investment: only about a quarter to a third of companies have a formal partner education program in place at all, despite certified partners generating multiples of the revenue of uncertified ones.
The pattern across this research is consistent: the gap between a well-architected channel program and an aging, patched one isn't a matter of degree. It's closer to running two different businesses on the same partner base — one that's been deliberately designed around current market reality, and one that's been maintained around a market reality that no longer exists.
Implication
The practical first step isn't a redesign. It's the diagnostic that most organizations skip: build the channel program you'd design today, from actual current TAM and target share, entirely separate from the one you're currently running — and then measure the delta between the two. That exercise doesn't obligate anyone to act on the full gap immediately. It converts an abstract sense that "the channel could probably be better" into a specific, sized number — which is the only thing that makes the keep-patching-or-rebuild decision an informed one instead of a default one.
The Question to Ask
If you built your channel program from scratch today — starting from your actual TAM and the market share you actually want — how different would it look from the one you're running right now, and do you actually know the answer or just suspect it?