Partners invest in co-marketing programs, marketplace listings, and content — and still don’t generate pipeline. When that happens, the default diagnosis is budget: spend more on ads, produce more content, add another campaign. The real diagnosis is almost always positioning.

Partners deliver 70.1% of all IT deals and add value throughout the customer journey,¹ which means the channel isn’t a secondary path to revenue — it’s the primary one for most technology companies. When a well-funded program still underperforms, the problem usually isn’t the size of the investment. It’s what that investment is saying, and to whom.

Three Root Causes

1. Solution messaging leads with features instead of buyer pain. It’s only natural to describe what a product does: the integrations, the specs, the capabilities. But different buyers in the same deal are asking entirely different questions. A business decision-maker is asking why this matters now. A line-of-business manager is asking how this solves their problem. Only the technical evaluator is actually asking what it does. Content built around features — by default — speaks to the smallest audience in the room and leaves the buyers who control budget and priority without a reason to act.

2. Content speaks to the pitch, not the discovery phase. Most partner content is built for the moment a prospect is ready to talk — pitch decks, demos, sales one-pagers. But buyers don’t start there. B2B International’s research shows B2B audiences typically complete 60% of the purchase process before engaging the supplier or its sales team.² At any given time, only about 5% of a company’s target audience is actually ready to buy — the other 95% are still in the awareness and consideration stages of the buying journey.³ If a partner’s content library is built entirely around the pitch, it has nothing to offer that 95% during the exact window where preference and shortlist decisions actually get made. And by the time the partner shows up, the buyer has often already ruled them out or moved on without ever knowing they existed.

3. Channel layers each require different messaging, and most partners are writing one version for everyone. A partner listing, a piece of content, or a campaign asset usually has to work for at least three audiences at once: the end customer deciding whether to buy, the seller deciding whether to recommend, and the ecosystem partner deciding whether to extend the offer through their own relationships. Each of those audiences is asking a different question — the customer wants to know if this solves their problem, the seller wants to know if this makes their job easier and helps them hit their number, and the partner wants to know if this creates a channel opportunity for them too. A single generic message can’t do all three jobs. Most partner marketing efforts try anyway and end up not fully answering any of them.

Sequence Matters More Than Speed

64% of companies report that more than half of their new customers come through partner-influenced or co-sold deals,⁴ which is exactly why it’s tempting to skip straight to content production — more assets, more campaigns, more marketplace listings, faster. But content built before strategy is set tends to reinforce the same positioning problem it was meant to solve. Odigo’s GTM Accelerator methodology addresses this by working the problem in a fixed order:

1. Define the strategy first. Identify the target market, the buyer pains that matter most, and a differentiated joint value proposition that leads with customer outcomes instead of product features.

2. Build the buyer journey next. Map what each buyer type needs at each stage — awareness, consideration, and decision — before deciding what content to produce or which channels to prioritize.

3. Produce the content last. With strategy and journey in place, content gets built to do a specific job at a specific stage for a specific audience, rather than being a generic asset stretched across all three.

No shortcut through that sequence works because content produced ahead of strategy just gives partners more of what wasn’t working in the first place — more volume, same gap.

Start With a Partner Marketing Assessment

It takes 30 days and tells you exactly where the gap is — whether that’s messaging, buyer journey coverage, channel-specific positioning, or something else entirely. Before adding another campaign or another piece of content, it’s worth knowing which of the three root causes is actually driving the underperformance.

¹ Channel partner investment in cloud hyperscalers: a strategic pivot point |Canalys
² When Do B2B Buyers Reach Out to Sales | 6sense
³ Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule: most B2B buyers are not in the market right now | John Dawes, in partnership with the LinkedIn B2B Institute
⁴ 2025 Ecosystem Compass Report | Bridge Parters