In 1637, Descartes published his Discourse on Method, “of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking truth in the sciences”. His insight fits in one simple idea: intelligence is not enough, you need a way of proceeding.
Almost four centuries later, the insight applies surprisingly well to indirect business. The companies we meet lack neither energy, nor talent, nor good partners. What they lack is a framework. With apologies to Descartes for the nod: indirect business, too, benefits from being conducted with method!
The reality: the absence of method
In most organisations, each Channel Manager works according to their own experience, intuition and personal reflexes. What works for one is neither formalised, nor passed on, nor reproducible.
Take two Channel Managers in the same company. The first meets their five key partners every quarter, tracks their business plans and anticipates gaps. The second spends their days answering emergencies, chasing quotes and preparing presentations. The first gets far better results. But nothing of their practice is written down or shared. The day they leave the company, their method leaves with them.
Performance then rests on individuals… never on the organisation.
Aligned tools do not make a method
Other companies believe they have structured their indirect development because they have a partner programme, a CRM, a portal and a Channel Manager. But lining up tools has never constituted a method.
Without an overall approach, these building blocks work in silos: recruitment ignores the value proposition, onboarding ignores the business plans, and steering boils down to a few revenue spreadsheets.
Activity is then confused with strategy. Decisions are made as opportunities arise, priorities shift from one quarter to the next, and teams multiply actions… without ever knowing whether they are moving in the right direction.
The problem does not come from the partners, nor from the products. It comes from the lack of a shared method to select, develop and steer the network.
The real challenge: fighting opportunism
60% of partnerships fail. The finding is damning, and opportunism is the leading cause.
For a long time, indirect development was built intuitively. A reseller wants to distribute your solutions? We recruit them. An integrator shows interest? We sign a contract. A sales rep knows a potential partner? We register them. A customer asks for a local partner? We look for one.
Taken one by one, each of these decisions seems reasonable. It is their accumulation that causes the problem. Gradually, the network evolves at the mercy of opportunities… but it is not built, it does not commit, it does not develop.
The symptoms are well known: disappointing results, partners who do not get involved, new partners who underdeliver, overwhelmed Channel Managers who often do the job in their partners’ place. And an executive committee that legitimately starts asking questions, because it senses that the network’s capacity is largely underexploited.
Why a method changes everything
Indirect development is often presented as a mere sales channel. We believe it is far more: it is a genuine management discipline. And like any management discipline, it demands a vision, a method, processes, tools, indicators and governance.
Nobody would think of running a direct sales force without objectives, a pipeline and reviews. Yet that is what many companies do with their partner network, even though it often represents a major share of their revenue.
A method answers essential questions:
- Which markets do we want to develop?
- Which partners should we recruit, and how many do we really need?
- Which partner categories should we prioritise?
- Which partners should we develop first?
- Where should we invest, and how do we arbitrate our resources?
- How do we measure performance?
In other words, a method turns a succession of opportunities into a genuine strategy.
The five principles of the PAD Method®
The PAD Method® is a reference base of 38 performance levers to structure, develop and steer a high-performing partner strategy. Its ambition: to turn your network into a strategic asset and a genuine engine of growth. It rests on five founding principles.
- Start from the strategy, never from opportunities. The partner network must translate the company’s ambitions and its go-to-market, not result from a series of encounters.
- Build the right network rather than the largest. Partners are selected according to the markets to cover, the offers to sell, their potential and their capacity to create value.
- Treat every partner as an investment. Recruiting, onboarding, training, supporting and developing a partner has a cost. Resources must therefore be concentrated on the partners with the greatest development and profitability potential.
- Turn the partner relationship into a joint project. Value proposition, onboarding, business plan, co-selling, marketing and convergence align the company and its partners around shared objectives, actions and commitments.
- Steer the network as a strategic asset. Performance is measured at every level, from the partner to executive management via Channel Managers and channel management, based on business plans, KPIs, regular reviews and a steering cockpit.
A progressive, tailored logic
The PAD Method® follows a simple logic in five stages: indirect strategy, network organisation, network construction, network development, then network steering.
Each stage is tailored and prepares the next. Each lever reinforces the others. Performance therefore does not come from applying a few best practices in isolation, but from their coherence and their execution over time.
Back to our two Channel Managers. With a shared method, the first one’s practice becomes the whole team’s: the same reviews, the same business plans, the same indicators. The second no longer has to improvise, and the company no longer depends on a single person.
In one sentence: the PAD Method® means moving from an opportunistic management of partners to a genuine system for managing indirect performance — structured, executed and steered.
Where to start?
As with Descartes, the first rule is to take nothing for granted. Before deciding what to change, measure where you really stand: on which levers your network is solid, and on which it still relies on intuition. That is often the first step of a method that lasts.