mbfinotti/partnerships-skillsチェック済み
SKILL DETAIL
partner-enablement
mbfinotti/partnerships-skills/partner-enablement
Sequence the training, content, and certification a B2B partner program needs to make partners self-sufficient sellers - the partner enablement roadmap, not the training content itself. Covers the skills-gap needs assessment, enablement tracks split by partner role and type, certification design and refresh cadence, and a pilot cohort, all designed backwards from the partner's first deal. Also covers B2C analogs (franchise, dealer, ambassador education). Use whenever the user mentions partner enablement, partner certification, channel partner training, a partner onboarding curriculum, or ramping partners to a first deal, even if they never say enablement. Do NOT use for affiliate welcome emails - use mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@affiliate-onboarding-sequence instead.
インストール · 507出典を見る
Installation
npx skills add https://github.com/mbfinotti/partnerships-skills --skill partner-enablement
スキルファイル
SKILL.md
最終同期 · 2026/10/23
evals/evals.json›
{
"skill_name": "partner-enablement",
"evals": [
{
"id": 1,
"prompt": "We're at Loftwell (workflow automation software, about $9M ARR). We signed 62 partners over the past 14 months - roughly two-thirds resellers, the rest digital agencies - and exactly 7 have ever registered a deal. Enablement is me, half-time. The good news is our direct sales org has a really solid enablement library already: a 60-slide pitch deck, an objection-handling doc, the rep onboarding video series, and a competitive teardown. I want partner enablement stood up in the next 8 weeks. Where do we start and what does the whole plan look like?",
"expected_output": "An interview-first engagement that gathers deadline, ambition and effort-ceiling answers, presents and ranks the three sequencing approaches before designing, recommends the minimum-viable first-deal path, and treats the existing direct-sales library as unusable unchanged.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Asks clarifying questions one at a time rather than batching several into a single message.",
"Asks for the date the result must land by, whether the user wants a one-off win or a compounding asset, and the effort ceiling, before proposing any plan.",
"Presents exactly three sequencing approaches - minimum-viable first-deal path, certification-first launch, and comprehensive up-front curriculum - before designing anything.",
"States the ranking of those three approaches out loud rather than implying it through list order.",
"Recommends the minimum-viable first-deal path as the default.",
"Waits for the user to pick a sequencing approach before building out the roadmap sections.",
"Treats the existing direct-sales pitch deck, objection doc, rep onboarding videos and competitive teardown as unusable by partners in unchanged form, and says so explicitly.",
"Names adaptation per role and partner type - not better distribution or a portal upload - as the fix for the direct-sales library.",
"Calls for at least one partner-only asset that has no direct-sales equivalent, such as a margin calculator, co-brandable collateral, or deal-registration mechanics.",
"Defines the first-deal path as the minimum knowledge, access, and actions a partner needs to register one qualified opportunity.",
"Attaches a total partner-hours figure to that first-deal path.",
"Keeps the first-deal path within roughly a working day of partner time.",
"Labels everything beyond the first-deal path as explicitly post-first-deal rather than as a prerequisite."
]
},
{
"id": 2,
"prompt": "Our CEO came back from a customer advisory board convinced we need a certification program. Company is Arvexa - document workflow software, about 40 channel partners, mostly small resellers of 8 to 30 people. What he wants: three certification levels, a mandatory 90-day curriculum every partner completes, three multiple-choice exams, and no partner may register a deal until they have passed all three. Live by the end of next quarter. Help me build it.",
"expected_output": "A redesign that moves certification behind the first deal, tests whether certification is warranted at all, replaces multiple-choice gating with a capability check, and surfaces the burden and brand exposure a marketed credential carries.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Warns that placing mandatory certification before the first deal is a known failure pattern, with stalled partners and collapsed activation as the outcome.",
"Notes that the partners who finish a pre-deal gauntlet tend to be those with idle bench capacity rather than those with customers.",
"Recommends moving certification to a post-first-deal milestone instead of a pre-registration gate.",
"Tests whether certification is warranted at all against conditions such as customers checking credentials before buying, an unvalidated partner damaging customers, or the need for a defensible gate for tiers, co-sell priority, or lead routing.",
"States that certification is not a default component of a partner program.",
"Offers a capability check inside onboarding - a live pitch or demo pass - as the alternative for a small or young program.",
"States that multiple-choice knowledge exams are the weakest signal and are acceptable only for entry-level product literacy.",
"Recommends a hands-on lab or practical assessment as the minimum for any credential that gates economics.",
"Requires each certification level to gate something economic - tier status, discount level, MDF eligibility, lead routing, or co-sell priority - or not exist.",
"Flags that a vendor-marketed credential is a public capability claim needing legal or brand sign-off.",
"Notes that the credential is hard to withdraw once partners advertise the badge.",
"Sizes the certification burden numerically as hours per person times people required times exam fees, against the economic payoff the partner sees.",
"Raises certified-headcount requirements as a wall for partners of 8 to 30 people."
]
},
{
"id": 3,
"prompt": "Pinecrest Data here - we run a referral-only partner program. 130 partners, all consultancies and boutique advisory shops who pass us names. None of them implement anything; we do 100% of delivery ourselves and that is not changing. I sketched an enablement plan with five tracks: partner sales rep, solutions architect, delivery/implementation consultant, partner marketer, exec sponsor. I marked the delivery track as phase 2 for next year since nobody needs it yet. Review the plan and tell me what to build first.",
"expected_output": "A revised audience map that deletes the tracks no role in this base fills, names them as deleted rather than deferred, and orders the surviving tracks by build effort against what each unblocks.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Removes the delivery/implementation consultant track from the plan entirely rather than deferring it to a later phase.",
"Names that track explicitly as deleted in the audience map, with the reason that the partner base contains no delivery consultants.",
"Warns that a track parked as a later phase returns as scope nobody budgeted.",
"Applies the same existence test to the solutions architect / pre-sales track, given a referral-only base that neither demos nor implements.",
"Keeps a track for every customer-facing role that does exist in this base.",
"Sizes referral-partner depth as roughly a 30-minute product overview plus a clean handoff mechanic.",
"Orders the surviving tracks by build effort against what each one unblocks, not by importance alone.",
"States that ordering out loud rather than leaving it implied by row order.",
"Builds the partner sales rep track first.",
"Expresses build effort in orders of magnitude such as an hour, a week, a quarter, or a standing job.",
"Cites the risk of spending months of enablement built for a partner profile that does not exist in the base."
]
},
{
"id": 4,
"prompt": "I have $40,000 approved for partner enablement this year and a hard ceiling of one week of build time per asset - anything bigger I cannot staff. Company is Northbound Logistics Software, 28 resellers. I need a ranked build list, most cost-effective first, with a cost against each line so I can show finance exactly what we are cutting. On the table: sales play and battlecard, deal registration walkthrough, co-brandable pitch deck, demo script plus a self-guided demo environment, a pre-sales technical track, and an implementation/delivery track with certification.",
"expected_output": "A build order expressed in effort magnitudes against what each item unblocks, with no currency attached, the over-ceiling items struck rather than deferred, and the starved item named with its promotion condition.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Refuses to attach a currency figure to any item in the build order.",
"Gives the reason for that refusal: a price goes stale faster than the ordering it was meant to justify.",
"Expresses each item's build effort as an order of magnitude - an hour, a week, a quarter, or a standing job.",
"Pairs each item's effort with what that item unblocks rather than reporting effort alone.",
"Ranks the deal-registration walkthrough at or near the top on effort-to-outcome ratio, sized at about an hour of screen recording.",
"Places the sales play and battlecard first or second, on the grounds that the items beneath it have nothing to sell without it.",
"Deletes the demo environment, the pre-sales technical track, and the implementation/certification track from this cycle given the stated one-week-per-asset ceiling.",
"Says explicitly that those items are struck, rather than listing them as a later phase.",
"States the ranking out loud rather than implying it through row order.",
"Names the demo environment as the item this efficiency ordering starves.",
"Gives the condition that would promote the demo environment anyway - deals stalling at the demo stage, or partners pulling a vendor rep onto calls.",
"Does not present the $40,000 figure as the basis for the ordering."
]
},
{
"id": 5,
"prompt": "Median time from partner signature to first closed deal is 143 days at Halcyon Grid (network monitoring, 51 partners). Last year it was 96. Leadership is treating this as a training problem and has asked me to rebuild the curriculum. Before I spend a quarter on that, what is actually going on and what do I do?",
"expected_output": "A diagnosis that works the three candidate causes in order, isolates which one is actually an enablement fault, checks the cheap disqualifying items first, and withholds a curriculum rebuild until the cause resolves.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Refuses to treat an inflated time-to-first-deal as automatically an enablement fault.",
"Names three candidate causes - the enablement minimum being too large, partner manager overload, and partners signed without qualification - and works them in that order.",
"States that only the first of those three is an enablement problem.",
"Checks the size of the mandatory pre-selling path before proposing any curriculum rebuild.",
"Checks whether a partner economic case was ever made.",
"Routes a recruiting or program-structure cause to the sibling partner program-design skill rather than solving it inside the enablement roadmap.",
"Works the cheapest disqualifying check before the expensive one.",
"Notes that trending above roughly 90 days is the commonly cited rebuild signal for time-to-first-deal.",
"Flags that time-to-first-deal bands come from PRM-vendor or channel-consultancy sources with undisclosed methodology and are directional rather than measured.",
"Asks whether the metric counts closed-won or first deal registration before benchmarking against any band.",
"Does not commit to rebuilding the curriculum before the diagnosis resolves."
]
},
{
"id": 6,
"prompt": "Board meeting in five weeks. Our partner academy shows 78% course completion and 212 certificates issued across 44 partners, average quiz score 86%, and training CSAT of 4.4 out of 5. I want a slide that says our enablement investment is paying off. What is the strongest version of that slide, and what am I missing? Company is Verrick Systems, B2B security tooling.",
"expected_output": "A correction that platform metrics only evidence the lower evaluation levels, plus the cohort comparison, data join, and role-level coverage view needed to evidence that enablement actually worked.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"States that completion rates, quiz scores, and training satisfaction reach only Kirkpatrick Levels 1 and 2.",
"Identifies that Levels 3 and 4 require deal-registration and CRM data joined to the learning-platform data.",
"Names the trained-versus-untrained partner cohort comparison as the measurement that separates enablement having happened from enablement having worked.",
"Specifies the comparison dimensions: partner-sourced opportunities, time-to-first-deal, and win rate.",
"Requires unified partner identity across the learning platform, portal, and CRM before that comparison is possible.",
"Warns that attribution breaks the moment those systems stop sharing a partner ID.",
"Rejects the 212 raw certificate count as a capability measure and requires certification coverage by role per partner instead.",
"Gives the failure a raw count hides: a partner holding many sales certificates and no technical ones.",
"Calls for a certified-but-inactive list of partners who completed training and produced no pipeline.",
"States that completion above roughly 60-70% is described as strong yet proves nothing without activation.",
"Attaches a reliability flag to any benchmark band cited, noting the figures are PRM-vendor sourced with undisclosed methodology.",
"Warns against citing vendors' own circulating cohort claims, such as certified partners earning multiples more or structured onboarding closing first deals 2-3x faster, as evidence.",
"Recommends running the user's own cohort comparison instead of citing published figures.",
"Does not present the 78% completion rate or the 86% quiz average as evidence that enablement worked."
]
},
{
"id": 7,
"prompt": "Partner portal logins are down 41% quarter over quarter at Brightmoor Tech. We have 380 assets in there covering absolutely everything, downloads are flat, and even our top 10 partners barely log in. My read is that partners just are not motivated, so I want to add points, badges and a leaderboard to pull engagement back up. Sanity check me before I brief the vendor.",
"expected_output": "A diagnosis ordering access friction ahead of motivation, naming the asset volume as a content-dump failure, and converting the request log into a ranked build backlog instead of adding gamification.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Diagnoses access friction - passwords, login flow, slow interface, poor findability - before partner motivation.",
"Notes that single-sign-on portals see measurably higher engagement.",
"Identifies 380 assets as the documented content-dump failure rather than a strength.",
"Recommends curating ruthlessly: identify the small fraction of assets that drives revenue and retire the rest.",
"Recommends an asset-request path so partners can ask for what they do not see.",
"Treats the asset-request log as the build backlog, ranked by request count against the build effort each request implies.",
"Gives the shape of that ranking, such as a repeatedly requested one-pager outranking a single request for a lab.",
"Checks asset origin - whether the assets were recycled from direct-sales enablement - as a content-fit question before treating the problem as distribution.",
"Reads falling engagement as a leading indicator of commercial decline rather than as a standalone metric.",
"Treats low adoption of one specific asset as a signal about that asset: update, reposition, or retire it.",
"Checks whether partners are rebuilding assets themselves, which signals a co-brandability or fit failure rather than a distribution failure.",
"Does not recommend gamification as the primary fix."
]
},
{
"id": 8,
"prompt": "I run partner programs at Copperline Group. Until now it has been software resellers, but we just acquired a company with 140 franchised service locations plus a dealer network of 60 independent dealers. I have been told to extend our existing partner training program to cover them. Our current program is role-based tracks, an online academy, and an annual certification tied to tier status. What changes?",
"expected_output": "A design that adds the train-the-trainer layer, switches certification to per-site mandatory coverage with its compliance weight, reshapes front-line content, and names what carries over unchanged.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Adds a train-the-trainer layer where the brand trains the franchisee or general manager, who then trains their own staff.",
"States that this layer is structural in franchise and dealer networks rather than an optional addition.",
"Flags that brand-standard certification in franchising carries legal or compliance weight that B2B partner certification does not.",
"Changes certification coverage to per-site and mandatory for the franchise locations.",
"Contrasts that per-site coverage with B2B's per-organization certified-headcount thresholds.",
"Designs front-line content as short, motivating micro-content with competitive literacy for hourly staff.",
"Contrasts that with B2B partner reps as independent economic actors who need a margin case.",
"Notes that franchisors can contractually mandate training completion while B2B vendors can only incentivize it.",
"Keeps role segmentation before building anything as unchanged across both worlds.",
"Keeps the academy or learning platform as the delivery backbone in both worlds.",
"Does not apply the B2B margin-case framing to hourly front-line staff."
]
},
{
"id": 9,
"prompt": "Leadership wants our certification program to look like AWS's. Specifically: Advanced tier needs 6 certified individuals, Premier needs 25 with at least 10 at professional level, plus launched-project counts with a minimum MRR. We have 34 partners, median size 12 people, and I would like to publish the new tier requirements in six weeks. Draft the requirements. Company is Saltwick Analytics.",
"expected_output": "A response that refuses to transplant a hyperscaler structure, flags its staleness, separates individual from organizational instruments, contrasts composite against checklist validation, and hands threshold design to the tiering skill.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Warns that large-vendor program structures are revised roughly annually and must be re-verified against the vendor's own current program documentation before any detail is cited.",
"Advises against copying a large vendor's structure, on the grounds that its partner counts and budgets are orders of magnitude larger than this program's.",
"Flags a 6-certified and 25-certified headcount requirement as a wall for partners with a median size of 12 people.",
"Notes that at least one major cloud program added a small-business designation after partner feedback on exactly this headcount problem.",
"Recommends a lighter track for small partners before headcount requirements wall them out.",
"Distinguishes individual accreditation from organizational competency as two different instruments.",
"States that the organizational designation, not the individual credential, is the instrument that gates tiers and co-sell eligibility.",
"Contrasts weighted composite scoring, where strength in one category partially offsets another, against discrete checklist validation, where every control is satisfied individually.",
"Gives the criterion for choosing between them: composite for flexibility and partner-friendliness, checklist for defensibility and consistency.",
"Recommends free-and-short credentials at the individual entry level, with expensive validation reserved for the organizational level.",
"Hands the tier threshold design - where the bar sits in the ladder, measurement windows, gameability checks - to the partner-tiering sibling skill rather than setting it here.",
"Sets an expiry or renewal cadence per credential level rather than issuing permanent credentials.",
"Pairs any increase in recertification cadence with delta-training on what changed rather than full re-examination."
]
},
{
"id": 10,
"prompt": "I have three weeks to produce an enablement plan for Kelso Interactive's channel, 47 partners. I already know what is wrong - I talk to our three best partners constantly and they have told me exactly what they need: better competitive positioning and a demo environment. I would rather not burn a week on interviews. Write me the plan.",
"expected_output": "A needs assessment that widens the sample to include inactive partners or mines existing artifacts, produces a gap document ranked by impact per unit of fix effort, and pilots before scaling.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Pushes back on designing the plan from the three best partners alone.",
"Specifies interviewing 5-10 partners deliberately split between active and inactive ones.",
"States that inactive partners are the more valuable half, because they explain why the program failed them.",
"Offers a fallback when interviews are impossible: mining joint business plans, QBR notes, the portal's asset-request log and search queries, support tickets, and win/loss notes.",
"Produces a gap document mapping each enablement component from current state to desired state.",
"Carries evidence, impact, and fix effort per gap in that document.",
"Ranks gaps by impact per unit of fix effort rather than by impact alone.",
"Explains that ranking by impact alone promotes the quarter-long gaps and buries the hour-long ones.",
"Sizes the demo environment as roughly a quarter of work and competitive positioning as roughly a week that rides along with the sales play already being written.",
"Concludes that competitive positioning ships before the demo environment even though the demo environment ranks higher on impact.",
"Plans a pilot cohort with selection criteria, success criteria, a feedback loop, and a scale trigger before rolling out broadly.",
"Recommends socializing the near-final roadmap through a partner advisory council before public launch, rather than using the council to generate the first draft."
]
},
{
"id": 11,
"prompt": "Two things. First, I need the actual partner battlecard and a 20-question certification exam by Friday for Windmere Cloud's new reseller program. Second, our plan is to put every prospective partner through the full product and sales training during the evaluation period, before they sign the reseller agreement, so that we only ever sign partners who are already trained. 19 partners in the pipeline. Go.",
"expected_output": "A scope correction that declines to author the training artifacts, moves training behind signature while keeping the economic case before it, and assigns single accountable ownership plus per-asset owners and refresh dates.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Declines to write the battlecard copy and the exam questions, and states that those are downstream deliverables built from the roadmap.",
"Describes what the roadmap does instead: it sequences and gates.",
"Moves product, sales, and technical training to after signature.",
"Keeps the partner value case and partnership economics before signature.",
"Names training a partner with no economic reason to invest as the documented 'no value proposition for the partner' pitfall.",
"States that partners are rational economic actors who ration selling time across competing vendors.",
"Requires every track to answer what the partner gets economically before it lists any content.",
"Names a single accountable owner for the enablement roadmap.",
"Keeps that single ownership even where content creation stays distributed across product marketing, channel ops, or a training team.",
"Names fragmented ownership across those teams as a documented failure pattern.",
"Budgets an enablement track for the vendor's own channel organization - partner managers, channel sales, solutions engineers.",
"Assigns an owner and a review or refresh date to every asset class.",
"Stops at an approval gate, finalizing nothing without the user's explicit approval of the assembled spec."
]
}
],
"trigger_queries": [
{ "query": "build a partner enablement roadmap for our reseller program", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our partners sign and then never sell anything", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how do I get a newly signed reseller to their first deal faster", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "should we certify our channel partners at all", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "what should a partner certification actually gate", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "design a training curriculum for our implementation partners", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "channel partner training plan for next year", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our SIs can't demo the product without one of our engineers on the call", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "partner onboarding curriculum", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "we want to launch a partner academy", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "what does a partner need to know before they can register a deal", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "time to first partner deal is four months, what do we fix", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how many hours of training should a referral partner realistically do", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "we pushed our sales deck into the partner portal and nobody uses it", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "design the first-deal path for a new MSP partner", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how often should partner certifications be refreshed", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our partner portal has 400 documents and nobody downloads them", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "do only the reseller's sales reps need a training track, or more roles?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "we only have a sales track for partners, is that enough", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "franchisee training program for 90 locations", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how do we train dealer staff on the new product line", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "education program for our brand ambassador network", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "prove to my CFO that partner training is paying off", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our certified partners produce no pipeline at all", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "should passing certification be required before a partner can resell", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "pilot a new partner training program with a small group first", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "partner skills gap analysis", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our own partner managers don't know what partner content exists", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "we're launching a channel next quarter, what do partners need on day one", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "ramp plan for newly signed VARs", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how do I split training between a referral partner and a systems integrator", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "what should partners learn before they sign versus after", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our partners keep rebuilding our slides themselves", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "exam or hands-on lab for partner accreditation?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "40 of our partners hold sales certificates and none hold technical ones", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "sequencing the learning path for a new channel partner", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how long should a partner's mandatory onboarding take", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "we built eight training modules and partners finished none of them", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "which roles inside a partner company need their own training", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "run our training plan past a partner advisory council", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "partner competency model for our channel", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "what does it take to make a partner self-sufficient", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "my channel team wants to build a certification and I'm not convinced", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "refresh schedule for partner-facing content", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "who should own partner training internally", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our resellers can pitch but they can't implement", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "our learning platform only reports completion rates and that isn't enough", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "roadmap to get partners selling without us in the room", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "new product just launched, how fast do we retrain the channel", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "training plan for our partners' solutions architects", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "what should we build first for a brand new channel program", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "partners say nobody ever showed them how to get paid on a deal", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "walkthrough video for partners submitting a deal registration", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "MSP enablement has to be different from reseller enablement, right?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "structure a multi-level partner certification", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "partner activation rate is 12% and they just sit there", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how much training will a small partner actually tolerate", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "co-brandable campaign kits for our partners' marketing people", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "how do we stop partners escalating every architecture question back to us", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "a listening tour with partners before we design anything", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "write the welcome email series for newly approved affiliates", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "our approved affiliates never send a single click", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "affiliate activation email sequence", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "cold email template to recruit new affiliates", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "pitch coupon and cashback sites to join our affiliate program", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "design our silver / gold / platinum partner tier ladder", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "what benefits belong in each partner tier", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "demotion rules for partners who miss their tier targets", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "migrate our existing partner base into the new tier structure", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "are we even ready to build a partner program yet", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "which partner motions should we run - referral, reseller, or services", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "design a channel program from scratch including governance", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "what should our program-wide channel economics envelope be", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "build a per-partner scorecard with weights and thresholds", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "QBR agenda for our largest reseller", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "this partner missed targets two quarters running, what's the corrective ladder", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "quarterly partner health check process", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "deal registration protection window and approval SLA policy", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "how do we split deal credit between direct and partner sellers", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "comp neutrality for our AEs on partner-sourced deals", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "two partners are claiming the same account", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "our direct rep and a partner are both working the same opportunity", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "is this reseller worth signing? model the partner P&L", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "partner CAC versus direct CAC for our channel", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "rank these five candidate alliances by expected value", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "map our whole partner and channel ecosystem", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "which partner category should we launch next", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "is an AWS Marketplace listing worth it for us", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "plan a joint webinar with our integration partner", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "brief the creator we just signed for this campaign", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "negotiate usage rights and exclusivity with a YouTuber's manager", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "shortlist creators for our spring campaign", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "how do we measure our influencer campaign", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "what commission rate should we pay affiliates", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "lifetime versus 12-month recurring affiliate commission", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "draft the prohibited tactics clauses in our affiliate agreement", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "does this TikTok caption need an #ad tag to be compliant", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "this affiliate's traffic looks like bots", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "reconcile this month's affiliate commission payout before we disburse", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "what metrics belong on our affiliate performance dashboard", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "how big should our refer-a-friend reward be", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "customers are self-referring to farm referral credits", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "how do I break into partner management as a career", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "write a job description for a channel partner manager", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "design the interview loop for a partner manager hire", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "build our internal sales enablement library for our own AEs", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "ramp plan for newly hired account executives to hit quota", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "30-60-90 day onboarding plan for a new SDR we just hired", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "improve our product's user onboarding flow", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "reduce time to value for new self-serve signups", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "in-app onboarding checklist for new SaaS users", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "onboard a new engineer to this codebase", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "build a customer education academy for our end users", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "study plan for the AWS Solutions Architect exam", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "is a PMP certification worth getting", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "which LMS vendor should our HR team buy", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "train-the-trainer program for our internal support team", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "annual security compliance training for employees", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "write the actual battlecard copy for our top competitor", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "which partnerships skill should I be using for this project", "should_trigger": false }
]
}
references/certification-design.md›
# Certification Design
Whether to certify, what to certify, and what a credential must gate to be worth a partner's time. Design levers here are vendor and practitioner consensus, not a standard; the 2022-2026 structural trend is what the large vendors publish in their own program guides.
## First decision: certify at all?
Certification is not a default. It earns its cost only when at least one holds:
- Customers check partner credentials before buying (common in cloud/infrastructure ecosystems).
- The product is complex enough that an unvalidated partner damages customers and the brand.
- The program needs an objective, defensible gate for tiers, co-sell priority, or lead routing.
A young program with a handful of partners is usually better served by a capability check inside onboarding (a live pitch or demo pass) than by a formal certification apparatus.
## Individual accreditation vs organizational competency
Two different instruments - mature programs run both:
- **Individual accreditation**: a person passes an assessment. Portable (it leaves when the person does), cheap to issue, drives coverage.
- **Organizational competency/specialization**: the partner company holds a designation, typically requiring N certified individuals in named roles PLUS validated customer outcomes (references, delivered projects, sometimes third-party assessment). This is the instrument that gates tiers and co-sell eligibility.
Count organizational requirements in certified-headcount-by-role, not raw certificates. The headcount requirement is a real wall for small partners - at least one major cloud program built a separate small-business designation after partner feedback for exactly this reason.
## Assessment format: exams vs labs vs outcome validation
- **Knowledge exam**: cheapest to run, weakest signal. "A certification a partner clicks through certifies nothing" (practitioner formulation). Acceptable for entry-level product literacy only.
- **Hands-on lab / practical assessment**: validates capability - a live demo pass, a sandbox implementation, a role-played discovery call. The recommended minimum for anything that gates economics.
- **Outcome validation**: the credential (or its renewal) requires demonstrated real-world results - launched customer opportunities, delivered projects, customer references. This is where the major vendor programs converged between 2022 and 2026: away from pay-to-play and volume tiers, toward validated, outcome-gated designations. Strongest signal, highest burden; reserve for top-level designations.
## Completion economics: what gets finished vs refused
Completion follows economics, not content quality. Certifications get completed when they are:
1. Free or low-cost and short - a few hours per credential at entry level.
2. Tied to tangible economics: tier status, discount level, MDF eligibility, lead routing, co-sell priority, directory ranking. One major program's partner-matching engine explicitly favors accredited partners - a direct economic pull.
3. Linked to a real capability check, so the credential means something to customers.
They get refused when long, expensive, knowledge-only, or decoupled from margin - and when certified-headcount requirements exceed what a small partner can staff. Ask the burden question numerically in the roadmap: hours per person x people required x exam fees, against the economic payoff the partner sees.
## Recertification and credential decay
- Set an expiry per level: entry credentials commonly lapse around annually; organizational designations commonly re-validate every 2-3 years (observed vendor range).
- The decay argument (attributed to channel analyst commentary, not a study): customers check credentials and expect partners to hold the current level; a certification earned against last year's product may already be stale. Fast-moving products need faster recertification - but every cadence increase is a burden increase, so pair it with delta-training (what changed) rather than full re-examination.
## Linking certification to tiers and co-sell
Certification counts are a legitimate tier criterion - the major vendor programs all wire certified-headcount into tier attainment. If the roadmap uses certification this way, say so explicitly in the spec and hand the criteria design (thresholds, measurement windows, gameability checks) to `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-tiering`. This skill decides what the certification validates and costs; the tiering skill decides where the bar sits in the ladder.
## Negative example: the certification gauntlet
A vendor launches its program with a mandatory 90-day certification gauntlet: every partner must complete a multi-week curriculum and pass three exams before they may register a single deal. Documented outcome pattern: partners stall in the gauntlet, activation collapses, and the partners who do finish are the ones with idle bench capacity - not the ones with customers. The failure is sequencing, not rigor: certification was placed before the first deal instead of alongside or after it.
The corrected pattern deliberately avoids the gauntlet - minimum viable path to first deal registration in the first weeks, with certification as a post-first-deal milestone that unlocks economics (better margin, co-sell, leads), so the learning curve tracks the earning curve. (Pattern assembled from convergent practitioner accounts; no controlled study exists.)
references/curriculum-architecture.md›
# Curriculum Architecture
What to build, for whom, in what order. All sequencing guidance here is practitioner consensus from channel practitioners and PRM-vendor sources - internally consistent, not independently validated.
Every ordering below is a default, not a law. Each assumes a vendor building from nothing with roughly one enablement person, and each shifts with who executes it.
Re-rank against what you already know about this user before reciting any of it:
- an existing demo environment collapses the demo row's effort
- an already-technical partner base moves the technical domain up
- direct-sales collateral that adapts cleanly (adapts - never recycled) cuts the sales rows
Effort is stated as build time in orders of magnitude - an hour, a week, a quarter, a standing job - never as a budget figure, which goes stale faster than the ordering it justifies.
## Table of Contents
- [The four training domains](#the-four-training-domains)
- [Role-based tracks](#role-based-tracks)
- [Depth varies by partner type](#depth-varies-by-partner-type)
- [Build order](#build-order)
- [Two content audiences](#two-content-audiences)
- [Distribution rules](#distribution-rules)
- [Negative example: the recycled direct-sales programme](#negative-example-the-recycled-direct-sales-programme)
## The four training domains
Order investment by deals unblocked per build hour, not by which domain is easiest to write:
1. **Sales** - value proposition, ideal customer profile, objection handling, competitive positioning. A week of adaptation; the only domain without which no deal happens at all.
2. **Product** - features, use cases, architecture, integration capabilities. A week per partner type; unblocks a credible discovery conversation, and the other three assume it.
3. **Technical** - implementation, configuration, troubleshooting, support workflows, hands-on labs. A quarter, and it comes off a real engineer's calendar rather than the enablement owner's.
4. **Certification** - a validation layer over the other three, not a fourth body of content. A standing job once launched, plus the only compliance exposure in this file: a marketed credential is a public capability claim, needs legal or brand sign-off, and is hard to withdraw once partners advertise it. Whether to certify at all, and what each certification gates, is decided at workflow step 8.
- value: sales > technical > product > certification
- effort: certification > technical > product > sales
- efficiency: sales > product > technical > certification
Technical outranks product on value and still loses to it on efficiency, purely on build cost - and that gap is exactly how the documented imbalance forms. Programs habitually over-invest in sales and marketing content and under-serve technical roles because efficiency is the only axis they ever compute. A partner whose engineers cannot implement will stop selling regardless of how good the pitch deck is.
Move technical to second the moment the base contains an SI, an MSP, or any partner who delivers rather than refers. Certification is last on every axis until a deal proves a gate is needed; where none of the three certify-at-all conditions holds, delete it from the build list rather than parking it at the bottom, or it silently reappears as scope.
## Role-based tracks
Distinct personas inside a partner organization need distinct tracks - one-size-fits-all onboarding wastes every persona's time. Build them in this order, highest deals unblocked per build hour first:
| Role | Track focus | Build effort | What it unblocks |
| ------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Partner sales rep | Pitch, ICP, qualification, objection handling, battlecard, deal registration | a week | every registered deal; no row below matters until this exists |
| Executive sponsor | Economics of the partnership, roadmap, tier progression - short, not a course | an hour: a slide and a call | the sponsor's decision to point their reps' selling time at you rather than a competing vendor |
| Solutions architect / pre-sales | Demo mastery, architecture, integration docs, sandbox/labs | a week, then a standing job to keep the sandbox alive | partners showing the product without you on the call |
| Delivery / implementation consultant | Implementation playbooks, configuration, support workflows | a quarter | partner-delivered projects, and the second deal from the same partner |
| Partner marketer | Co-brandable campaign kits, messaging guardrails, MDF mechanics | a week per kit, recurring | partner-sourced pipeline instead of vendor-sourced |
- value: sales rep > pre-sales > delivery > partner marketer > executive sponsor
- effort: delivery > pre-sales == partner marketer > sales rep > executive sponsor
- efficiency: sales rep > executive sponsor > pre-sales > delivery > partner marketer
Pre-sales and partner marketer tie on effort because both are a week that never ends - one maintains a sandbox, the other reprints kits every campaign; they do not tie on value, and pre-sales wins that axis outright. The executive sponsor track is the sharpest disagreement on the list: last on value, second on efficiency, and the one most often skipped, because an hour of slides looks too small to schedule.
The efficiency order starves the delivery track: third on value, first on effort, so a ratio demotes it every time and the partner who was sold to never gets implemented for. Promote it above pre-sales the moment partners deliver the work themselves, or the moment second deals from an existing partner matter more than first deals from new ones - a botched first implementation costs that partner's whole future pipeline, which no efficiency ranking prices in.
A role that does not exist in the partner base gets deleted from this menu, not demoted - a referral-only base has no delivery consultant to train, and that track is a quarter spent on nobody. Every customer-facing role that does exist still gets a track (pass threshold 3); the ranking decides which one exists first, never which one is skipped.
## Depth varies by partner type
Standardize core messaging; vary depth by type and maturity with modular paths. Build shallow-and-many before deep-and-few unless the base is already skewed to the deep end:
| Partner type | Depth needed | Build effort | What it unblocks |
| ------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Referral | ~30-minute product overview plus a clean handoff mechanic | an hour | referred opportunities across a wide, low-commitment base |
| Reseller | Full sales track plus deal-registration discipline | a week | transacting partners; reuses the sales-rep track almost unchanged |
| MSP | Operations and support depth a transactional reseller never needs | a quarter | recurring managed revenue - same product, different enablement, because the business models differ |
| SI / implementation | Multi-day technical training and labs | a standing job | large delivered projects, and partners building a practice on you |
- value per partner: SI > MSP > reseller > referral
- effort: SI > MSP > reseller > referral
- efficiency: referral > reseller > MSP > SI
The value and efficiency orders invert exactly, which is the whole decision: depth costs most where it pays most per partner, so the answer is set by how many partners of each type the base actually holds, not by which type sounds most strategic. What that inversion starves is the SI track - highest value per partner, highest effort, dead last on efficiency, and therefore never built by a program that ranks on the ratio alone. Promote it when a handful of SIs carry more revenue than the whole referral base, or when an SI is building a delivery practice on you and will take that practice to a competitor if the training does not exist.
Confirm a technical partner profile exists in the base before building for it - and where it does not, delete those tracks from the plan rather than scheduling them late. Roughly 18 months of enablement, recruitment, and tier structure built for a partner profile that turned out not to exist is a documented practitioner outcome, and a deferred track is what it looks like on the way there.
## Build order
Design backwards from the first deal: the curriculum's mandatory core is only what a partner needs to identify a qualified opportunity, hold a credible discovery conversation, and submit a deal registration. Everything else is post-first-deal, delivered as the deal progresses ("just-in-time").
| # | Asset | Build effort | What it unblocks |
| --- | ----------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 1 | First sales play + battlecard | a week, adapted - never recycled from direct sales | the partner opening a conversation at all; every row below assumes it |
| 2 | Deal-registration walkthrough | an hour: a screen recording of the portal flow | the registered deal itself, the partner's margin on it, and the attribution behind every KPI in the program |
| 3 | Pitch deck / one-pager, co-brandable | a week | the partner running the meeting in their own brand voice instead of rebuilding the deck themselves |
| 4 | Demo script + self-guided demo environment | a quarter to stand up, a standing job to keep current | partners demoing without you on the call - the most commonly reported gap in channel programs |
| 5 | Pre-sales technical track | a quarter | technically qualified opportunities, and architecture questions answered without escalation |
| 6 | Implementation/delivery track and certification | a standing job | delivered projects, and the credential that gates tier or co-sell economics |
- value: sales play > demo environment > deal-reg walkthrough > pitch deck > pre-sales technical > implementation/certification
- effort: implementation/certification > demo environment > pre-sales technical > sales play == pitch deck > deal-reg walkthrough
- efficiency: deal-reg walkthrough > sales play > pitch deck > demo environment > pre-sales technical > implementation/certification
Sales play and pitch deck tie on effort because they are the same week of writing, by the same person, off the same source material - they do not tie on value, and the play ships first.
The demo environment is what this order starves: second on value, second on effort, fourth on efficiency, and simultaneously the most commonly reported gap in channel programs - the ratio and the field's own complaint list disagree here, and the ratio is what usually wins. Promote it above the pitch deck as soon as deals stall at the demo stage or partners keep pulling a vendor rep onto calls, because at that point every deal in flight is paying its build cost weekly.
The table is ordered by efficiency with one dependency override: the sales play leads because the rows beneath it have nothing to sell without it. The walkthrough is the highest ratio on the list - one hour of screen recording standing between a partner and the registration that pays them - so it ships in that same first week rather than fourth, where practitioner build orders habitually leave it. Rows 1-3 are the first-deal path; rows 4-6 are post-first-deal and get built while partners are already transacting.
A minimum viable program targeting the middle-tier partner can launch in roughly 4-8 weeks (PRM-vendor rule of thumb). A hard deadline compresses to rows 1-3 and nothing else; an effort ceiling under a week per asset deletes rows 4-6 from this cycle rather than scheduling them, and the roadmap says so explicitly instead of listing them as planned.
## Two content audiences
- **Internal to the partner**: battlecards, playbooks, training courses, FAQ - never seen by customers.
- **Prospect-facing, used by the partner with their customers**: case studies, how-to content, co-branded collateral, email templates.
The repeatedly stated caveat: availability is not the problem, usability is. Prospect-facing content must be customizable and co-brandable, or partners rebuild it themselves - and rebuilt content drifts off-message.
## Distribution rules
- Everything lives in the partner portal, on demand, with role-based access. Partners will not dig through email attachments for a battlecard; the approved version must be the easiest one to reach.
- Curate ruthlessly. Dumping hundreds of documents into a portal is the documented "content dump" failure - identify the small fraction that drives revenue, retire the rest.
- Let partners request assets they don't see; the request log is your build backlog, ranked by requests against the build effort each request implies - a repeatedly requested one-pager outranks a single request for a lab.
- Every asset class gets an owner and a scheduled refresh; content current at launch and never refreshed actively misleads partners, and it loses deals quietly because partners trust it.
## Negative example: the recycled direct-sales programme
The best-documented failure mode in the field, sourced to analyst channel research (Forrester/SiriusDecisions roundtables and reports):
A vendor "launches" partner enablement by exporting its internal sales-enablement library into the partner portal: the direct-sales pitch deck, the internal objection doc, rep onboarding videos, comp-plan-flavoured talk tracks. Result, as documented: lackluster content usage, failed messaging, underperforming recruitment and onboarding. Why it fails structurally: direct-sales content assumes the seller is a paid employee of the vendor, selling only this product, with internal systems access and a manager enforcing the motion.
A partner rep is none of these:
- they ration time across competing vendors
- need a margin story the internal deck never mentions
- cannot access internal tools the content references
- speak to their own customer base in their own brand voice
The fix is not better distribution of the same assets; it is adaptation per role and partner type, plus partner-only assets (margin calculator, co-brandable versions, deal-registration mechanics) that have no direct-sales equivalent. Treat any asset inherited unchanged from direct-sales enablement as a defect in the roadmap.
references/measurement-and-benchmarks.md›
# Measurement and Benchmarks
How to judge whether enablement worked. Reliability first: **no independent, non-vendor benchmark dataset exists for time-to-first-deal, activation rate, or certification completion.**
Every band below is a PRM-vendor or channel-consultancy figure with undisclosed methodology - directional rules of thumb, never measured constants. Say so whenever citing one.
## Kirkpatrick's Four Levels applied to a channel audience
Established training-evaluation methodology (Donald Kirkpatrick, 1959; "New World" update 2016). Not channel-native - this application is a practitioner adaptation, flag it as such:
| Level | In a partner program | Data source |
| ---------- | ----------------------------------------------- | ------------------------- |
| 1 Reaction | Did partners rate the training relevant | Learning platform surveys |
| 2 Learning | Assessment pass rates, pre/post knowledge delta | Learning platform |
| 3 Behavior | Do partner reps apply it in real deals | Requires field evidence |
| 4 Results | Partner-sourced pipeline, revenue, win rate | Requires CRM/deal data |
- **A partner learning platform by default yields only Levels 1-2** (completion, quiz scores, engagement). Levels 3-4 need deal-registration and CRM data joined in - plan the data join before launch, not after.
- Plan backwards from Level 4: define the business result first, then the behaviors, then the training.
- Level 3 without direct observation (you cannot shadow another company's reps): self-rated application scale + verification by the partner's manager or the partner account manager + one open question naming the blocker. Start measuring within 2-4 weeks of training, not after 90 days. Self-report alone is weak evidence.
- The channel-specific caveat: partner reps sit inside another company's incentive structure the vendor does not control - a perfect curriculum still fails Level 3 if the partner's own comp plan points elsewhere. Check the economics before blaming the training.
- Phillips ROI adds a fifth, monetized level (enablement spend vs partner revenue return) - established extension, rarely worth the modeling effort below a mature program.
- 70-20-10 (experiential/social/formal learning) is a widely cited heuristic with a weak empirical base; its useful channel implication is that formal course completion measures only the smallest slice of how partner capability actually forms.
## The KPI set
Four domains; track a core of 6-10 KPIs total, not everything available:
1. **Capability**: training completion, certification coverage BY ROLE per partner, assessment pass rates, recertification currency.
2. **Engagement**: portal logins, content views/downloads, asset requests, deal-registration volume, MDF utilization.
3. **Commercial**: partner-sourced pipeline and revenue, time-to-first-deal, win rate on registered deals, active-vs-dormant partner ratio.
4. **Experience**: partner satisfaction with enablement specifically.
Rules:
- **Coverage, not counts.** Count certified individuals by role per partner - a raw certificate total hides a partner with ten sales certs and zero technical capability.
- **Maintain the certified-but-inactive list** - partners who completed training and produced no pipeline. It is a named failure mode and a coaching/outreach queue; completion above 60-70% is described as strong for partner programs, but completion proves nothing without activation.
- **The proof artifact is the trained-vs-untrained cohort comparison**: contrast enabled and un-enabled partners on partner-sourced opportunities, time-to-first-deal, and win rate. This is the one measurement that separates "enablement happened" from "enablement worked." Circulating cohort figures (certified partners earning multiples more; structured onboarding closing first deals 2-3x faster) trace to vendors' own partner surveys - self-selected and self-serving; run your own comparison instead of citing theirs.
- **Attribution breaks the moment the learning platform, portal, and CRM stop sharing partner identity.** Unify partner IDs across systems before launch; a composite partner score (weighted across capability/commercial/activity/experience) only works on top of that join.
## Benchmark bands - all PRM-vendor sourced, directional only
- Time-to-first-deal: 60-90 days for most B2B SaaS programs; under 45 described as well-optimized; trending above 90 is the commonly cited rebuild signal.
- Time to first deal _registration_: sources conflict (under 30 vs under 60 days) - define registration vs closed-won before benchmarking anything.
- Activation rate (partners with a registered deal): 30-50% cited as a target band; 90-day activation above 60% described as mature, below 30% pointing at onboarding/enablement rather than partner quality. Sources conflict; pick one definition and track the trend, not the absolute.
- Onboarding completion: 80%+ target.
- Single-vendor claims, unverified: partners registering a first deal within 30 days being 4-5x likelier to be active at 12 months; 40-60% of partners not completing onboarding within 90 days going permanently inactive. Use as motivation for sequencing, never as fact.
- Content-usage statistics in circulation (65% unused, 90% unused, etc.) all measure direct sales reps, not partners - never present one as a partner figure. Genuine partner-specific figures now exist: Gleanster research found only 52% of partner marketing development funds get claimed, meaning nearly half goes unused every year; and the "content abandonment rate" (share of partner-portal assets never downloaded, shared, or viewed by any partner) is documented at under 15% in a healthy, demand-driven program, versus past 70% where the content strategy has fractured.
## Interpreting engagement honestly
- Low portal logins usually mean access friction (passwords, slow UI, poor findability), not partner apathy - single-sign-on portals see measurably higher engagement. Fix friction before diagnosing motivation.
- Falling engagement is the earliest warning: fewer logins, slower responses, no co-selling - commercial decline follows. Watch it as a leading indicator.
- Low adoption of one specific asset is a signal about that asset: update, reposition, or retire it.
- Whether an individual partner's decline triggers intervention is a scorecard question - hand it to `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-performance`; this skill judges the program.
references/needs-assessment.md›
# Needs Assessment and Collaborative Design
How channel professionals discover what partners actually need before building anything. Skipping this step is expensive: one published practitioner post-mortem documents ~18 months of enablement, recruitment, and tier structure built for a partner profile that turned out not to exist.
## The gap-analysis method
1. Interview 5-10 partners, deliberately split between active and inactive. Active partners tell you what works; inactive partners tell you why the program failed them - the more valuable half.
2. Map every enablement component to a current-state vs desired-state pair: onboarding path, product training, sales assets, demo capability, technical training, deal-registration mechanics, competitive positioning, co-marketing support.
3. Write the deliverable as a gap document: component, current state, desired state, evidence, impact, and fix effort in orders of magnitude (an hour, a week, a quarter, a standing job) - never a budget figure.
4. Rank by impact per unit of fix effort, not by impact alone, and say the ranking out loud; do not launch everything at once. Impact alone always promotes the quarter-long gaps and buries the hour-long ones that would have unblocked a deal this week. The most commonly reported gaps across practitioner sources are demo enablement (a quarter to fix, high impact) and competitive positioning (a week, and it rides along with the sales play already being written). The second usually ships first even though the first ranks higher on impact. A gap whose fix exceeds this cycle's effort ceiling is deleted from the plan and named as deferred, not left in it at low priority.
5. Launch fixes with a pilot group and collect feedback before scaling.
Complement interviews with surveys (product knowledge, satisfaction, marketing support - scale cheaply, miss nuance) and partner self-assessment tools. Interviews reveal what surveys miss; use both when capacity allows.
## Partner interview questions
Adapt, don't recite. The intent behind each matters more than the wording:
- What is driving your business this year, and what role does our category play in it? (surfaces whether enablement has any economic hook at all)
- Walk me through your last deal with us - where did you get stuck, and what did you improvise? (improvised assets are your build list)
- What did you expect from onboarding that you never got?
- Which of our assets have you actually used with a customer in the last quarter? Which did you rebuild yourself, and why? (rebuilt assets signal a co-brandability or fit failure, not a distribution failure)
- Could your team demo the product today without us on the call? What breaks first?
- What would a certification need to give you - economically - for you to put two people through it?
- Who inside your company would need training that we've never addressed? (usually surfaces neglected technical and delivery roles)
- What do competitors' programs do for you that we don't?
## Listening tour and partner advisory council
- A listening tour is the interview round above run deliberately across segments (type, size, tier, geography) before any design work - discovery before design.
- A partner advisory council is a standing forum where the vendor's executives and its most strategic partners review direction. Use it to socialize the near-final roadmap before public launch, not to generate the first draft.
- The documented trap: collecting partner feedback and doing nothing with it signals that input doesn't matter - worse than never asking. Close the loop visibly: "you said X, we changed Y."
- If the user cannot run interviews, mine what already exists: joint business plans, QBR notes, the portal's asset-request log and search queries, support tickets, win/loss notes on partner deals.
## Joint business planning inputs
Joint business planning (JBP) is the field's primary structured collaboration mechanism - a genuine documented discipline (analyst-defined process stages exist), though most vendors run it inconsistently or not at all. For enablement purposes, pull these inputs from any existing JBP:
- The partner's stated business goals, resources required, obstacles, and view of their competitive environment - the listening inputs.
- Any training and certification plan already committed per partner - enablement milestones that belong in your roadmap, not a parallel one.
- Revenue targets and target accounts - they size how much enablement investment a partner justifies.
The analyst-documented first pitfall of joint planning is "no value proposition for the partner." The same rule governs enablement: the partner's business case precedes the training plan. If a JBP shows no economic reason for the partner to invest learning time, fix that with the program-design or tiering sibling skills before building curriculum.
## The internal audience
Partner enablement has two audiences, and the second is frequently missed: the vendor's own channel organization. Partner managers, channel sales, and solutions engineers must know the program, the content, and the tooling at least as well as partners do. If a partner asks for a competitive battlecard and the partner manager doesn't know it exists, that is an internal enablement gap - budget a track for it in the roadmap.
## Ownership before content
A recurring documented failure: product marketing creates content, channel ops manages the portal, and a separate team runs training - uncoordinated, producing a fragmented program. Centralize accountable ownership of the roadmap in one named person even when content creation stays distributed. In small programs (roughly under 20-30 active partners), practitioners nest enablement under partner ops rather than hiring a dedicated enablement manager - a staged-investment heuristic, not a rule.
references/vendor-examples.md›
# Vendor Program Examples (2022-2026)
**Staleness warning: every program below revised its structure repeatedly between 2022 and 2026, and all revise roughly annually. Re-verify against the vendor's primary program documentation before citing any detail to a user. If you can browse the web, check the current program guide; if not, present these as historical structure patterns, not current requirements.**
These are examples for study - never copy a structure because a large vendor uses it; their partner counts and budgets are orders of magnitude beyond most programs.
## The shared 2022-2026 trend
Every major program moved the same direction: away from pay-to-play and volume-based tiers toward validated designations combining skilling (certified individuals), performance (customer additions/usage), and customer success (references, satisfaction). Credentials converted from static badges into performance-gated status.
## Microsoft - weighted composite score
- Oct 2022: 18 legacy Gold/Silver competencies replaced by 6 Solutions Partner designations; legacy Gold/Silver benefits last sold Jan 2025.
- Attainment via a Partner Capability Score across performance, skilling, and customer success: 100 points max per solution area, minimum 70 to attain, with points required in each category - a weighted composite where strength in one category partially offsets another.
- Separate enterprise vs SMB attainment tracks (different thresholds) for most solution areas; partners auto-assigned by customer size.
- Designation is prerequisite to specializations and expert programs.
## AWS - discrete checklist validation
- Tier thresholds tie directly to certified headcount: Advanced tier required 6 certified individuals, Premier 25 (at least 10 Professional/Specialty level), plus launched-project counts with minimum MRR per tier.
- Specializations (Competency, Service Delivery, MSP) validated by discrete checklists - each control satisfied individually, no trading between categories; MSP adds an independent annual audit.
- From 2026: Specialization renewal requires launched co-sell opportunities over a rolling 12-month window - outcome-gated renewal, the clearest instance of the trend.
- A small-business competency was added in 2024 after partner feedback that certified-headcount requirements walled out smaller partners.
## The structural contrast worth teaching
Microsoft = weighted composite (flexible, partners trade strengths); AWS = discrete checklist (rigid, every control individually). Both wire certified-headcount into tier attainment - certification as tier criterion, not standalone artifact. A program designer picks composite scoring for flexibility and partner-friendliness, checklist validation for defensibility and consistency.
## Google Cloud - two-level organizational credential
- Expertise: entry, company-level, valid ~2 years. Specialization: highest, valid ~3 years, requiring named counts of individuals holding specific professional certifications plus customer success stories, vetted by the vendor and a third-party assessor - the strongest published example of outcome validation via independent assessment.
## HubSpot - free individual certs, gated organizational accreditation
- Individual certifications: free through the vendor's academy, most taking only a few hours, lapsing roughly annually - the design template for high completion at entry level.
- Accreditations: organizational, requiring prerequisite certifications plus case studies, restricted to upper-tier partners, re-evaluated every 2 years.
- The economic pull: the vendor's internal partner-matching favors accredited partners for referrals - certification wired directly to lead flow.
- 2026: a monthly program membership fee introduced, and a sourced-revenue-points requirement from 2027 - status further performance-gated.
## Salesforce - competency consolidation
- Replaced a ~170-distinction navigator system with ~28 competency areas measured on certifications, project delivery, and customer satisfaction; consulting tiers collapsed from 4 to 2 (announced for FY27). Lesson: credential taxonomies that grow past what partners can explain get consolidated.
## ServiceNow, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks - briefly
- ServiceNow (2023): replaced a 37-area point system with explicit tiers scored on capacity (certified individuals), competency, customer success, capability; specializations added yearly since.
- Cisco (2020 overhaul): consolidated 10 associate-level tracks into one, moved specialization up a level, removed prerequisites - reducing entry burden while keeping depth optional.
- Palo Alto Networks (2023): specialization made mandatory to keep upper partnership status - certification converted from optional differentiator to tier-maintenance requirement.
## What to reuse, structurally
1. Free-and-short at the individual entry level; expensive validation only at organizational level.
2. Certified headcount counted by role, wired to tiers - via the tiering sibling skill.
3. Outcome-gated renewal for top designations (delivered projects, launched opportunities, references).
4. A lighter track for small partners before headcount requirements wall them out.
5. Consolidate credential taxonomies before partners need a decoder ring.
SKILL.md›
---
name: partner-enablement
description: Sequence the training, content, and certification a B2B partner program needs to make partners self-sufficient sellers - the partner enablement roadmap, not the training content itself. Covers the skills-gap needs assessment, enablement tracks split by partner role and type, certification design and refresh cadence, and a pilot cohort, all designed backwards from the partner's first deal. Also covers B2C analogs (franchise, dealer, ambassador education). Use whenever the user mentions partner enablement, partner certification, channel partner training, a partner onboarding curriculum, or ramping partners to a first deal, even if they never say enablement. Do NOT use for affiliate welcome emails - use mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@affiliate-onboarding-sequence instead.
license: MIT
metadata:
author: Maya-Beth Finotti
version: "1.0.8"
---
# Partner Enablement
Sequence what training, content, and certification partners need to become self-sufficient sellers. This skill architects and orders the enablement roadmap; it never writes the actual training module, battlecard, or exam - those are downstream tactical work.
No canonical partner-enablement methodology exists. Say so plainly rather than invent one. What the field genuinely offers:
- **Established methods are instructional-design methods only**: Kirkpatrick's Four Levels (1959) and Phillips ROI for evaluation, ADDIE and SAM for the build process, 70-20-10 as a heuristic (widely cited, weak empirical base). None is channel-native; applying them to partners is a practitioner adaptation - flag it as such.
- **Everything labeled a "partner enablement framework" or lifecycle model** is PRM-vendor content marketing or proprietary analyst IP (Forrester/Canalys) - internally consistent and often useful, never independent methodology.
- **The best-supported design principle is practitioner consensus, not research**: design backwards from the first deal - minimum viable knowledge to register a qualified opportunity, deeper training as deals progress ("align the learning curve with the earning curve").
- **The strongest analyst-sourced finding** (Forrester channel research): recycling direct-sales content to partners unchanged produces lackluster usage and failed messaging - the field's best-documented failure mode.
## Interview
Ask before designing anything. One question per message; offer multiple-choice options; skip whatever the user already answered.
- Is this B2B channel enablement, or a consumer-facing network - franchise, dealer, retail associate, ambassador/creator? Part of the design genuinely diverges (see B2B and B2C).
- Which partner types are in the program - referral, reseller, SI/implementation, MSP, ISV/tech - and which actually transact?
- What enablement assets exist today, and where did each come from: built for partners, or recycled from direct-sales enablement?
- What sales motion do partners run - refer, resell, implement, manage? Each needs different depth.
- What are the current time-to-first-deal and activation rate (share of signed partners with a registered deal)? "Not tracked" is an answer.
- Does certification already gate anything - tier status, discount, co-sell eligibility, lead flow - or is it a standalone badge?
- What certification burden will partners realistically bear: hours per person, exam fees, certified-headcount requirements? Smaller partners hit headcount walls first.
- Who owns enablement day to day, with what capacity - and does content creation sit elsewhere (product marketing, channel ops)? Fragmented ownership is a documented failure pattern.
- What does the partner get economically for investing the time - margin, services revenue, leads, MDF? Partners ration selling time across vendors.
- What does success mean, and by what date must it land - a first partner deal, a certified cohort, a board slide?
- Do you want a one-off win (one stalled partner selling) or a compounding asset (a curriculum that ramps every partner you sign next year)?
- What is the effort ceiling - enablement hours per week, whose calendar they come off, and how much political capital a certification mandate would cost you internally?
Those last three answers re-rank every option menu in this skill, so ask them before proposing anything:
- A near date promotes: the first-deal path, the deal-registration walkthrough, mined artifacts over partner interviews.
- A compounding mandate promotes: certification, the technical and delivery tracks, the partner-ID join behind the trained-vs-untrained comparison.
- A hard effort ceiling: defers every asset whose build cost runs past a week.
## Workflow
1. Run the Interview; collect every current-state fact the roadmap depends on.
2. Confirm scope: sequence enablement inside a program that already exists. Program structure, tier criteria, and partner scorecards belong to the sibling skills in the Reference section.
3. Run a needs assessment before building anything: interview 5-10 partners split between active and inactive, map each enablement component current-state vs desired-state, and produce a gap document. See [references/needs-assessment.md](references/needs-assessment.md).
4. Choose the sequencing approach before designing to it. Present the three candidates in the ranked order below - highest deals unblocked per hour of enablement build first - say the ranking out loud, recommend the top rung, and wait for the pick. Steps 5-10 build out whichever they choose; offered afterwards, the choice is not a choice.
| Approach | Build effort | Time to first partner deal | What it buys |
| ---------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Minimum-viable first-deal path (default) | a week | weeks | partners transacting while most of the curriculum is still unwritten |
| Certification-first launch | a quarter, plus sign-off on what the credential claims | a quarter or more | a defensible capability gate and a tier criterion, before any deal proves one is needed |
| Comprehensive up-front curriculum | a standing job | a quarter or more, often never | full coverage of every role and type, at the price of the firehose failure mode |
- efficiency: minimum-viable first-deal > certification-first > comprehensive up-front
- value: comprehensive up-front > certification-first > minimum-viable first-deal
- effort: comprehensive up-front > certification-first > minimum-viable first-deal
- compliance cost: certification-first > comprehensive up-front > minimum-viable first-deal
Certification-first carries the only real exposure of the three. A credential the vendor markets:
- is a public capability claim partners resell on
- is gated on legal or brand sign-off
- is hard to withdraw once partners advertise the badge
Move off the default only on a condition, not on program size. Certification-first earns its place when customers check credentials before buying, or an unvalidated partner can damage customers.
The efficiency order starves the comprehensive curriculum: it is first on value and first on effort, so it loses every round to a ratio. A program that only ever computes efficiency never reaches full role coverage at all - it ships the first-deal path and stops. Promote it when the deadline is far enough that no deal is waiting on the curriculum and the effort ceiling is genuinely a standing job.
Short of that, buy its coverage incrementally as post-first-deal tracks instead of dropping it. When the interview rules a rung out - no economic gate a certification could attach to, or an effort ceiling under a week per asset - strike it from the menu and say it is struck, rather than listing it as a later phase.
A rung parked at the bottom returns as scope nobody budgeted. Re-rank against what you already know: an existing demo environment, partners who are already technical, or direct-sales collateral that adapts cleanly all cut the top two rows' effort and can move a rung up.
5. Design backwards from the first deal: define the minimum viable knowledge, access, and actions a partner needs to register one qualified opportunity - and size it in partner hours. Everything beyond that path is explicitly post-first-deal training, not a prerequisite. A comprehensive up-front curriculum is the firehose failure mode.
6. Split tracks by partner ROLE (sales rep, solutions architect, delivery consultant, partner marketer, executive sponsor) and by partner TYPE (a referral partner needs a short overview; an implementation partner needs multi-day technical depth). Build them in the ranked order that reference gives - every customer-facing role that exists in the base still gets a track, the ranking only decides which exists first. A role the partner base does not contain is deleted from the audience map and named there as deleted, never scheduled late; a referral-only base has no delivery consultant, and a track left pending for one reappears as a quarter of work nobody planned. See [references/curriculum-architecture.md](references/curriculum-architecture.md).
7. Decide what is enabled before signature vs after: the partner value case and economics come before; product, sales, and technical training come after. Training a partner who has no economic reason to invest is the documented "no value proposition for the partner" pitfall.
8. Decide whether to certify at all, and what each certification gates. Certification can BE a tier criterion - if so, state it and hand the criteria design to `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-tiering`. See [references/certification-design.md](references/certification-design.md).
9. Set the refresh cadence per asset class, with a named owner per asset - stale content misleads partners more quietly than no content.
10. Plan a pilot cohort: launch the roadmap on a small, deliberately chosen partner group, collect feedback, then scale.
11. Validate the spec section by section per the next section - audience map, first-deal path, tracks, certification, cadence, pilot - revising on pushback before moving on.
12. Check the pass threshold; iterate the roadmap until every check holds.
13. Stop at the approval gate - finalize nothing without the user's explicit approval of the full spec.
14. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the approved roadmap, its sequencing decisions, and thresholds; otherwise tell the user to store the spec where partner ops can retrieve it.
If you can browse the web, verify any named vendor certification structure before citing it - major programs restructured repeatedly across 2022-2026. Otherwise flag vendor examples as possibly stale.
## Brainstorming the roadmap
Run the design the way channel teams actually run it - discovery before design, socialized before shipped:
- Ask one question per message throughout; never batch questions.
- Start with a listening tour: the 5-10 partner interviews from the needs assessment. If the user cannot run interviews, mine what exists - joint business plans, QBR notes, asset-request logs, support tickets, portal search queries.
- Pull joint-business-planning inputs where they exist: partner goals, resources, obstacles, and any training/certification commitments already made per partner.
- Present the three sequencing approaches at step 4, in step 4's ranked order and with its recommendation stated out loud, before any design step runs. Every ranking in this skill and its references is a default rather than a law: it shifts with the user's deadline, effort ceiling, and who executes the work, so re-rank it against the assets and skills this user already has instead of reciting it.
- Once the user picks a direction, present the spec one section at a time - audience map, first-deal path, tracks, certification, cadence, pilot - and validate each before writing the next.
- Recommend socializing the near-final roadmap through a partner advisory council before any public launch; collecting partner feedback and ignoring it is worse than not asking.
- Validate on the pilot cohort before scaling; expect v1 to be imperfect and plan the iteration window up front.
- Gate finalization on explicit user approval of the assembled spec.
## The Enablement Roadmap Spec
Deliver the engagement as this artifact - a decision record the user hands to partner ops, partner marketing, and the channel chief:
```
ENABLEMENT ROADMAP - <program>, <date>
Audience map : partner types x roles that need enabling; types/roles excluded, with why
Gap summary : per enablement component, current state vs desired state (from the
needs assessment), ranked by impact per unit of fix effort - not
by impact alone, or the quarter-long gaps crowd out the hour-long ones
First-deal path : minimum knowledge + access + actions to register a qualified
opportunity, sized in total partner hours; everything else is
explicitly post-first-deal
Tracks : per role x partner type - contents, depth, owner, and per track a
build effort (hours / a week / a quarter / a standing job) against
what it unblocks, listed in that ratio's order
Pre-signature : what is enabled before the agreement (value case, economics)
vs after (training, portal, deal registration)
Certification : certify or not, with why; per level - format (exam / lab /
outcome validation), burden in hours + fees, what it gates,
recertification cadence; tier-criteria design handed to
partner-tiering
Refresh cadence : per asset class - owner, review date, retirement rule
Pilot : cohort size + selection, success criteria, feedback loop,
scale trigger
Ownership : single accountable owner; where content creation sits; internal
enablement plan for the vendor's own channel team
KPIs : from the KPI section, incl. the trained-vs-untrained comparison
design and the first review date
```
Rules about the spec itself:
- Every track answers "what's in it for the partner" in economic terms before it lists any content - partners are rational economic actors rationing time across vendors.
- The first-deal path carries a mandatory hours number - a path nobody sized is a firehose in disguise.
- Every asset class carries an owner and a refresh date - unowned content rots into content that misleads.
- The spec sequences and gates; it contains no training content, battlecard copy, or exam questions - those are downstream deliverables built from this roadmap.
## Pass threshold
Ship nothing until all six hold; iterate until they do:
1. **First-deal path fits in hours, not weeks.** If the mandatory pre-selling path exceeds roughly a working day of partner time, it will not be consumed (practitioner consensus, no independent dataset).
2. **No unchanged direct-sales asset anywhere in the plan.** Every asset is either partner-built or explicitly adapted - the recycled-content failure is the best-documented in the field.
3. **Every customer-facing role has a track.** Programs over-invest in sales and neglect technical/delivery roles; a partner who cannot demo or implement will not sell.
4. **Certification gates something economic, or does not exist.** A badge tied to no tier, discount, lead flow, or co-sell priority gets ignored - completion follows economics.
5. **Every asset has an owner and refresh date, and the roadmap names one accountable enablement owner** - even if content creation stays distributed.
6. **Every ordered list in the spec shows the arithmetic under its order.** Each row of the build order, the track list, and the gap ranking carries a build effort in hours, a week, a quarter, or a standing job, against what that row unblocks. Never use a currency figure; it goes stale faster than the ordering it was meant to justify. An order with no ratio beneath it is taste presented as sequencing.
## Diagnosing an existing enablement program
When the user arrives with a running program instead of a blank page, match the symptom they report and work its row. This table is deliberately left unranked: the reader never picks a row - the symptom picks it - so ordering eight diagnoses nobody is choosing between would be false precision. The ordering that does apply lives inside each row, where "Check first" always names the cheapest disqualifying check before the expensive one.
| Symptom | Check first | Variable at fault |
| --------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Partners sign but never activate | Size of the mandatory pre-selling path; whether a partner economic case was ever made | First-deal path too large, or a recruiting/program problem - hand to the program-design sibling |
| Time-to-first-deal above ~90 days | The three usual causes in order: enablement minimum too large; partner manager overloaded; partner signed without qualification | Sequencing, capacity, or recruiting - only the first is an enablement fault |
| Certified but inactive partners | What the certification gates; whether it tests capability or clicks | Certification-economics link, assessment format |
| Content unused | Origin of the assets (recycled direct-sales?); then portal friction (logins, findability) | Content fit first, distribution second |
| Partners refuse certification | Burden (hours, fees, certified-headcount) vs the economic payoff; small-partner headcount walls | Certification burden design |
| Partners can't show the product | Whether a demo environment and demo script exist per track | Demo enablement - the most commonly reported gap |
| Stale content losing deals | Refresh cadence and per-asset ownership | Cadence and ownership, not volume |
| Only a sales track exists | Coverage of technical, delivery, and marketing roles | Track split by role |
## KPIs
Judge the enablement program, not individual partners (partner scorecards, QBRs, and underperformance triggers belong to `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-performance`):
- **Trained-vs-untrained cohort comparison** on partner-sourced opportunities, time-to-first-deal, and win rate - the one measurement that proves enablement worked rather than merely happened.
- **Certification coverage by role per partner** - not raw certificate counts; 40 sales certs and zero technical certs is a coverage failure hidden by a healthy total.
- **The certified-but-inactive list** - partners who completed training and produced no pipeline; a named failure mode and a coaching queue.
- Time-to-first-deal and activation rate, against the 60-90-day / 30-50% bands - PRM-vendor rules of thumb, no independent dataset exists.
- Content usage and portal engagement as the earliest warning signal - but read low logins as access friction first, apathy second.
Nearly every benchmark in this field is PRM-vendor sourced with undisclosed methodology - carry a reliability flag on any figure you cite. A partner learning platform by default yields only Kirkpatrick Levels 1-2; Levels 3-4 need deal data joined in. See [references/measurement-and-benchmarks.md](references/measurement-and-benchmarks.md).
## B2B and B2C
Identical in both worlds:
- segment learners by role before building anything
- tie certification to recognition and incentives to drive completion
- a learning platform or branded academy as the delivery backbone
- fast new-product training
- the core logic of enabling the person standing in front of the customer
Genuinely different - design for the difference:
- **Train-the-trainer is structural in franchise and dealer networks**: the brand trains the franchisee/general manager, who trains their own staff. B2B SaaS programs rarely formalize this layer; consumer networks cannot function without it.
- **Brand-standard certification carries legal/compliance weight in franchising** - enforced consistency across locations. B2B partner certification has no comparable legal exposure.
- **Coverage is per-site and mandatory in consumer networks** (every location run by certified people) vs B2B's per-organization certified-headcount thresholds.
- **Front-line mindshare**: retail and dealer associates are hourly staff who must be won over with short, motivating micro-content and competitive literacy; B2B partner reps are independent economic actors who need a margin case.
- **Ambassador/creator education is closer to consumer retail than to B2B channel**: short, self-serve, motivation-first, built for high volume at near-zero touch.
- **Contractual leverage**: franchisors can mandate training completion; B2B vendors can only incentivize it.
## Invocation Examples
- "Our partners sign and then never sell. Build the enablement roadmap - 60 partners, mix of resellers and agencies."
- "Design the first-deal path for a new implementation partner and tell me what belongs before signature versus after."
- "Should we certify partners at all? If so, what should certification gate, and how often does it need refreshing?"
## Reference
- See [references/vendor-examples.md](references/vendor-examples.md) for real 2022-2026 vendor program structures decomposed - with a staleness warning.
- See [references/measurement-and-benchmarks.md](references/measurement-and-benchmarks.md) for Kirkpatrick applied to a channel audience, KPI definitions, and benchmark bands with reliability flags.
- See `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-channel-program` for the overall program structure - motions, tiers, economics envelope, governance; enablement is one component it references.
- See `mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-performance` for partner scorecards, QBR structure, and underperformance triggers - this skill measures whether enablement worked, not whether a partner performs.