Best of LinkedIn: Channel Marketing & Partner Ecosystem CW 37/ 38

The channel is no longer a distribution afterthought, it is where enterprise deals now get built, funded, and closed. This edition tracks three forces moving in parallel: vendors resetting what they ask of partners, marketplaces compounding faster than the businesses selling through them, and a wave of named program launches, certifications, and collaboration agreements locking in that shift. Read together, the message is that ecosystem investment has moved from a nice to have to the primary growth lever.

Date

September 22, 2026

Channel Marketing

Thomas Allgeyer

Methodology: Every two weeks we collect most relevant posts on LinkedIn for selected topics and create an overall summary only based on these posts. If you´re interested in the single posts behind, you can find them here: https://linktr.ee/thomasallgeyer. Have a great read!

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Partner enablement and sales craft

Clarity, consistency, and trust beat incentives as what makes partners invest in a vendor
Enablement is judged on field confidence and consistency, not training volume
Enablement works by improving what a partner already sells well, not by adding a new product to sell
New entrants gain more from a deep share of a mid-sized partner than a token share of a giant
Relationship investment drives partner value more than referral fee swaps
Listening to distributors without a slide deck surfaces the real capability gaps
In APAC, buyers effectively buy implementation delivered by services partners and SIs, not software directly
Microsoft partner success comes down to legibility, sellers who can explain value unaided and name the internal metric they move
Incentive funding is shifting from resale margin toward lifecycle influence, while ecosystem spend stays fragmented across functions
Legacy reseller networks lag complex SaaS sales, and AI services acquisitions now price on practice health over technical depth

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Marketplace and co-sell mechanics

Okta, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake marketplace revenue is all outgrowing core company growth, in Okta's case nearly 4x
Marketplace teams past the $1B mark are embedding co-sell into existing sales motions, not running it separately
Switching marketplace tooling doubled marketplace revenue and tripled co-sell referrals in a year
Microsoft and AWS marketplaces diverge on commitment drawdown, private offers, payment terms, and procurement pathways
Salesforce AgentExchange private offers and a new Headless Toolkit are reshaping ISV co-sell and data access
A seven-layer Partner RevOps Stack and a shift to co-sell as an operating model are redefining ecosystem infrastructure
AI tooling is entering partner operations directly, flagging stale co-sell pipeline and nudging the right sellers
AWS is lowering the entry bar with an earlier startup on-ramp and a free starter pack for new partnership hires
Vendors that own their partner ecosystems are positioned to own the enterprise account relationship as AI disrupts the category

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New partnerships, programs and product launches

OpenAI added HubSpot and Shopify as its first CRM and ecommerce partners for ChatGPT Ads
Lovable opened a partner program with certification, a solutions tier, and a partner directory
Labra signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS after five years of building
Cohesity and TD SYNNEX launched a commercial offering for data protection partners
Cognizant joined the o9 partner ecosystem with joint North America opportunities
Cisco's 360 Influence Deal Registration went live for advisor and developer partners
Laurel went live on Microsoft Marketplace with Pegasus selection and co-sell certification
Glean launched a partner network for enterprise AI implementation and co-selling
Zip launched Marketplace integrations alongside an expanded AI data partner ecosystem
An AWS partnerships podcast featured TrendAI passing $1B in marketplace sales
TD SYNNEX and Google leadership are already planning 2027 partner enablement and growth
Brady's completed Honeywell acquisition brings no immediate changes for existing BlueStar partners
EULER launched POPS sub-agents to automate recurring partner operations tasks

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Events, awards and industry pulse

Zscaler's kickoff gathered over 400 partners from 23 countries around AI security
ServiceNow's Data and AI Partner Day centered on data readiness as the deciding factor in AI success
Partner Advisory Council feedback points to demand for AI service enablement and faster product training access
Microsoft Portugal's FY27 partner session highlighted marketplace and AI co-sell as the near-term opportunity
A partnerships use case reaching a Dreamforce keynote signals rising executive sponsorship for the function
Salesforce redesigned its partner awards around customer success, treating recognition as a go-to-market lever
Comstor's Cisco FY27 kickoff set secure networking as the top growth priority for the year ahead
A CDW and Twilio enablement day focused on account mapping and public sector pipeline
ROI framing is emerging as what strengthens partner conversations with customers
Microsoft's partner program consolidation is bringing new deadlines and training requirements

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Thanks to Gael Tang, Jeremy Jeanjean, George Hope, Aly Noureldin, Shankar Radhakrishnan, George Vitko, Juston Salcido, Jon Yoo, Spencer Parikh, Stacey Floyd, Marc Sumner, Alastair Borissow, Grant Mjelstad, Andy Henderson, Jonathan Lewis, Shannon Handley, Pablo Hanono, Reis Barrie, Nathan Miller, Pari Natarajan, Sam Yarborough, Austin J Wentzlaff, Bill Moffett, Rob Moyer, Mike Mason, Vince Menzione, Ghassan Lababidi, Lela Koopal-Patel, Gavin Booth ‍, Rajat Kohli, Debra Webb, Amee Ricketts Mungo and Asher Mathew for contributing insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: