Two reps are working the same account. One is yours, one is your partner’s. Both find out at roughly the same moment, and neither is pleased.
What happens next determines whether you have a channel next year.
Most companies treat this as a people problem and try to solve it with a conversation. It is not a people problem. It is a design problem, and it is entirely preventable.
The Root Cause Is Almost Always Compensation
Start here, because everything else is downstream.
If your account executive earns less on a partner-sourced deal than a direct one, you have built channel conflict into your comp plan. Your rep is not being difficult. They are responding correctly to the incentive you designed.
No amount of rules of engagement survives a comp plan that punishes cooperation. Your reps will find the edges, register accounts defensively, and quietly discourage partner involvement, and every one of those behaviours is rational.
The fix is boring and it works: pay your reps the same, or close to it, on partner-influenced deals. Yes, that costs margin. It costs less than a channel that never functions.
Rules of Engagement That Are Actually Usable
Most rules of engagement documents are six pages and nobody has read them. A usable one answers four questions on one page.
Who owns an account nobody has registered? Decide by segment, by geography, or by named account list. Any clear answer beats a fair-sounding vague one.
What happens when both parties are already in? Not “we will discuss.” A default: first registered wins, or the incumbent relationship wins, or it splits. Pick one now, while nobody is angry.
How long does registration protect a deal? Ninety days is common. Without an expiry, partners register everything defensively and the register becomes meaningless.
Who decides when it is disputed? One named person, on your side, with the authority to make the call in forty-eight hours. Not a committee.
Deal Registration: Theatre Versus Function
Almost everyone has deal registration. Most of it is theatre.
It becomes theatre when the form takes fifteen minutes, when approval takes a week, when partners never hear back, or when registration confers no real protection. Any one of those and partners stop bothering, and you lose the visibility that made it worth building.
Registration only works if the rest of the enablement does. If a partner cannot sell without you in the room, they have nothing to register.
Functional registration has four properties: it takes two minutes, it is approved or rejected within a day, the partner is told why, and being registered actually means something your rep will honour.
Test yours by registering a deal yourself, as a partner would. Most people are surprised, and not pleasantly.
Say What Is Off Limits, Out Loud
House accounts are legitimate. Some accounts you will always sell direct, for good reasons.
Hiding that list is the mistake. A partner who invests three months in an account they were never going to be allowed to close does not just lose that deal, they conclude the whole programme is a trap and disengage from everything.
Publish the list. It costs you a slightly awkward conversation at the start, and buys you a partner who trusts the rest of the map.
Design It Before You Need It
Every rule above is easy to agree when there is no money on the table and nearly impossible once there is.
The moment to write your rules of engagement is before your first partner deal, when nobody has a stake in the answer. If you already have partners and no rules, write them now and grandfather the current pipeline. That is uncomfortable once. Renegotiating account by account is uncomfortable forever.
The Signal to Watch
You will not usually be told you have a conflict problem. Partners do not escalate, they disengage.
So watch for the quiet version: registrations dropping, partners going around you to the customer, deals that appear at the proposal stage having been invisible until then. All three mean your partners have decided the system does not protect them, and they are protecting themselves instead.
By the time a conflict reaches you as a complaint, you have usually already lost several deals to it silently.
P.S. If your partners have stopped registering deals, they have not stopped selling. They have stopped telling you.
