Customers Want to Buy Through Partners. Most Vendors Still Can't Find the Right Ones.

The Demand Is Already There. The Supply Side Is Guessing.

I have spent the better part of two decades watching software companies try to grow across Asia Pacific, and I have lost count of the number of times a leadership team has told me, with complete confidence, that their buyers want a direct relationship.

Then I sit in on a customer call. The customer asks who else has deployed this in their region. They ask for local support. They ask for someone who understands their regulator, their language, their procurement quirks. Nobody in the room says the word "partner", but everybody in the room has just described one.

That gap between what buyers actually want and what vendors assume buyers want is one of the most expensive misjudgements in our industry. And the evidence is now hard to argue with. Forrester's 2025 research found that two-thirds of B2B organisations expect partner-influenced revenue to grow above or significantly above the prior year, with growth expectations running over 30% higher than the year before¹. Buyers are not being pushed into the channel. They are choosing it.

So the interesting question is no longer whether customers want to buy through partners. They do. The interesting question is why so many software companies still cannot reliably identify which partners deserve to carry their product.

The Buyer Has Already Decided. The Vendor Has Not.

Here is the uncomfortable sequence of events. A buyer decides they want to purchase through a local partner because it de-risks the decision, shortens the support chain and keeps the relationship close. They search. They ask peers. They find two or three names.

Meanwhile, the vendor, somewhere in another time zone, is running a quarterly partner review. The conversation is about territories, margins and pipeline coverage. Nobody in that meeting has any structured view of which Value-Added Distributors (VADs) in that market are actively looking for a solution like theirs, which ones already have the certifications, which ones have delivered comparable deployments, and which ones are simply listed on every directory because listing is free.

The buyer has moved on. The vendor is still doing homework.

I have watched this play out repeatedly, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. The demand signal is real and it is early. The supply-side response is late, informal and almost entirely dependent on who happened to be in the room at the last industry event.

The Hidden Cost of Improvised Discovery

When I ask channel leaders what partner discovery actually costs them, they usually answer with a number of months. Rarely do they answer with a number of pounds.

That is the first problem. The cost is real, it is just not measured. It shows up in four places.

First, business development time. A team of three people spending a quarter qualifying distributors who were never going to commit is a quarter of salary, travel and management attention that produced nothing. Nobody writes that off against the partner programme, which is precisely why it keeps happening.

Second, consultant and event spend. Directories give you lists. Consultants give you opinions at a premium. Events give you a lanyard and a stack of cards from people who were polite to you for eleven minutes. None of these produce evidence of intent.

Third, the cost of the wrong partner. This is the expensive one. A distributor signed on enthusiasm and evaluated on a spreadsheet will absorb enablement budget, consume your technical resources and then quietly underperform for eighteen months while everyone avoids the conversation.

Fourth, and least discussed, the cost of the partner you never found. Somewhere in a market you have deprioritised, a distributor with the exact vertical coverage and certification depth you need is actively looking for a principal in your category. You will never know. There is no line item for that loss, which is why it never appears on a board slide.

Existence Is Not Intent

The channel has no shortage of directories. What it has a shortage of is signal.

A directory tells you a company exists, operates in a region and claims a set of capabilities. Every VAD overstates its strengths early. I say that without malice; it is simply what any rational commercial organisation does when the cost of overstating is zero and the cost of understating is a lost opportunity.

The question a principal actually needs answered is different. Is this distributor actively looking to add a product like mine in the next two quarters? Do they have declared focus markets that overlap with my expansion plan? Are they investing in enablement, or are they collecting logos?

Those are intent questions, and intent cannot be inferred from a website. It has to be declared, structured and comparable. The moment you make it comparable, the quality of the shortlist changes completely.

What Structured Discovery Actually Changes

My view is simple. Partner discovery should be treated as a workflow, not an errand.

That means four things happen in sequence, and each one builds context for the next.

You define what you are actually looking for before you start looking. Market entry goals, required certifications, vertical coverage, commercial model, service capability. Written down. Reusable across markets. This single discipline eliminates more wasted effort than any other, because it stops the search from being driven by whoever replied to your email most recently.

You search against that definition rather than against a keyword. Filters, project criteria and declared intent signals do the work that a consultant used to do slowly and expensively.

You connect with consent and context. A distributor who has declared interest in your category is a fundamentally different conversation from a cold introduction. The first meeting starts at the second meeting.

You evaluate against the same criteria every time, so that a shortlist in Singapore and a shortlist in Germany are comparable documents rather than two different opinions from two different people.

That is the operating model CoBolt Hub was built around. It is deliberately focused on the first mile of partnership, before onboarding, before contracts, before anyone has spent money building something that should not have been built. Profiles capture capability and declared intent. Projects capture your criteria. Evaluation captures the reasoning. Dashboards keep it visible as priorities shift.

It is not a CRM and it does not pretend to be one. Once a partnership is real, it belongs in your existing systems. CoBolt Hub exists to make sure you only get that far with the right partner.

Both Sides Are Choosing

Here is the part that vendors consistently underestimate. Distributors are doing exactly the same evaluation, in the opposite direction, and they are doing it with better discipline than most principals bring to the table.

A VAD adding a principal to their portfolio is making a multi-year bet on their own reputation. If the product does not deliver, if the roadmap stalls, if the vendor will not invest in local enablement, the distributor carries that failure in front of their customers. They know this. Which is why the good ones are increasingly reluctant to take a meeting based on a slide deck and a territory map.

When both sides declare capability and intent in the same structured format, the conversation changes character entirely. It stops being a negotiation about whether the partnership is worth having and becomes an assessment of how to make it work. That is a materially better use of everybody's afternoon.

The Risk of Staying Informal

The buyers have already made their choice. They want the partner route, and the revenue is following them there¹.

What remains undecided is which vendors will be visible and credible when that choice is made, and which will continue to rely on who they happened to meet.

In my experience, the companies that lose channel opportunities are rarely the ones with the weakest products. They are the ones whose discovery process was informal enough that nobody could tell, at the end of the quarter, whether the shortlist was actually the best available or simply the most convenient.

That is not a strategy. That is a habit. And habits are expensive when the market is moving.

If your buyers already prefer to buy through partners, the least you can do is know which partners are worth their trust. Start with a profile, define your criteria, and look at the market with structure rather than optimism.

CoBolt Hub - CoBolt Hub is a structured partner discovery platform for software principals and Value-Added Distributors, built around capability, coverage, and intent signals.

Sources