TL/DR
Whether you’re a hyperscaler that needs to drive more consumption, or a tech company building your strategic plan for next year, scaling multi-partner selling better be a top priority for 2026.
50% of sellers miss their targets
Most revenue executives have looked externally to explain their declining sales numbers. They point to macroeconomic uncertainty, AI budget shuffles, and cite budget freezes. And yes, these external factors are real and contribute to missed sales targets each quarter.
But executives need to also look inward. The market changes over the past 5 years distracted CROs and CFOs from a bigger change impacting sales performance. The B2B buying process has completely changed, yet sales DNA and playbooks haven’t changed.
- Business buyers have changed how they evaluate and purchase technology solutions. They now turn to experts they trust for which products to consider and which companies to work with [Forrester].
- Deal dynamics are more complex, with at least seven partners now surrounding every mid-market and enterprise account [McKinsey].
- Deals are influenced by partners and experts advising your buyers long before your newest Account Executive assigned to their account ever talks with them.
Sales organizations stuck in 2016 won’t hit their numbers in 2026.
Sales is at a Breaking Point
The sales process must evolve. When sellers get their new territories in Q1 they should not start calling in to these accounts trying to build new relationships. Instead, sellers should engage and learn from the partners already involved in their accounts. Understanding which partners have influence and figuring out how to align with these partners should be the top priority when Account Executives get their new accounts. The successful AE of the next ten years will be those sellers that can orchestrate influence around the buyers and decision-makers before, during and after the sale.
The need for multi-partner selling
Every big company already drives revenue with partners. That’s how they got big. The sales reps that get invited to President’s Club already co-sell with partners, that’s how they crush their quotas. But co-selling today is an opportunistic or one-off process. We wrote about the business imperative for companies to scale-up co-selling with their best partners back in 2024. The need for co-selling today is even greater and more complex because co-selling with just one or two partners is no longer enough.
Winning in 2026 requires multi-partner selling. Setting sales teams up to hit their quotas and company sales targets requires an investment in new multi-partner sales programs, new partner sales tools, co-selling skills, and access to multi-partner data so Account Executives can collaborate with all the partners influencing their buyers.
Multi-partner selling examples
Multi-partner selling takes co-selling to the Nth degree by orchestrating influence and collaborating with multiple partners on the same accounts. Here are some real-life examples:
- Technology Partners Co-Selling with SIs: Two or more technology partners recommend each other’s solutions because they’re complementary, create better outcomes for customers, and keep competitors out of their accounts. Instead of working in isolation, these partners share customer whitespace information with each other, and work with the same SIs to sell an integrated solution that addresses the buyer’s complete needs.
- Co-Selling with Resellers: Companies that sell through channel partners already work closely with VARs that have established relationships with target buyers. These resellers provide the local presence and trusted advisor status, but often need co-selling support from a vendor’s product specialist to win deals. In a multi-partner sales motion, the vendor’s product specialist or channel sales rep, the reseller, and often another technology or cloud partner work together from the beginning of the sales cycle to deliver a complete solution to the customer.
- Co-Selling with GSIs: Global systems integrators have the most coveted relationships in the enterprise. Their customers literally pay them millions of dollars each year to advise and solve their biggest strategic challenges. Everyone wants to co-sell with GSIs, but doing so effectively requires that Account Executives are well-trained in the nuanced art of co-selling and understand their supporting role within these deals.
- Co-Selling with Hyperscalers: Hyperscalers have locked down billions of dollars’ worth of commitments to spend through their marketplaces. Within just a few years, these cloud commitments and credits have become the tech industry’s new corporate credit card. Everyone wants to transact through these marketplaces to make purchasing easier and tap into the unspent committed cloud spend. Hyperscalers call transacting through their marketplace “co-sell”, but this limited focus on the sales transaction misses the first 26 miles of the marathon sales cycle.
- Distribution-Led Co-Selling with Multiple ISVs: Distributors are quickly becoming go-to orchestrators of multi-partner sales plays. By pairing complementary ISV solutions, and coordinating with their network of resellers, distributors can deliver larger, more strategic solutions to end customers. In this motion, distributors work directly with the ISV channel teams to align messaging, combine value propositions, and drive bigger deal sizes through bundled offerings. This alignment not only accelerates revenue for all parties but also strengthens the distributor’s role as an orchestrator and revenue driver rather than just a point-of-sales transaction and fulfillment service.
- Reseller-Led Solutions with Hardware and Software Vendors: Resellers are increasingly turning into GSIs that can deliver complete, multi-vendor solutions that combine hardware, software, cloud components, and professional services to solve complex customer challenges. In this motion, resellers bring together multiple ISVs and OEM vendors, aligning their sales teams with product specialists from each vendor early in the sales cycle, and sell an integrated outcome. The result is a seamless customer experience where hardware performance, software capability, cloud scalability, and the services to manage it all come from a single supplier.
Make multi-partner selling a top priority for 2026
The biggest cloud and technology companies are launching multi-partner sales programs with their best partners. Companies that fail to orchestrate partner influence around buying teams will continue to lose deals and miss targets.
A multi-partner sales transformation initiative is a journey, not a destination. But using the “Power of 3” framework, PartnerTap’s technology for automation, and strategic expertise and program support from experts at Bridge Partners you’re able to build your foundation and start running multi-partner sales programs within months, not years.
The executives who understand the new multi-partner selling reality and act now will hit their 2026 numbers. Those who don’t will be explaining to their board why they missed sales targets, again.
The choice is yours – invest in the new era of multi-partner selling or risk being left behind.