Sales kickoff season is in full swing. Ballrooms are filled. Quotas are announced. Product launches are unveiled. Territories are redrawn. Pipeline targets are projected on large screens with aggressive year over year growth curves.
Energy is high. Expectations are clear. Revenue is the theme.
But there is a quieter question most leadership teams avoid.
Where is leverage in this conversation?
Most SKOs are designed around direct execution: How much do we need to sell, who owns which accounts, what messaging will resonate, what new features can we position. The structure assumes revenue will come primarily from internal effort.
Yet many of the fastest growing B2B companies operate inside ecosystems. Their access to enterprise customers is often accelerated through hyperscalers, marketplace motions, strategic alliances, and embedded integrations.
If partnerships meaningfully influence revenue, why are they often treated as a side conversation at sales kickoff?
Who gets the stage
One simple diagnostic is visibility.
Are partners featured on the main stage, woven into the revenue narrative and annual strategy? Or are they relegated to a breakout session that only partnership managers attend?
Stage time reflects strategic importance. If the CRO spends an hour on pipeline inspection and five minutes on ecosystem leverage, the message is clear. Partnerships are supportive, not central.
Sales teams internalize what leadership emphasizes. If partner strategy is not front and center, it will not shape behavior in the field.
Compensation reveals intent
Another revealing signal is compensation design.
Is co-sell embedded into quota attainment models? Are partner influenced deals neutral, rewarded, or quietly discouraged because they complicate credit and margin?
It is common to see slides that celebrate ecosystem alignment while comp plans create friction against it. Sellers respond rationally. They optimize for what gets paid.
If co-sell is mentioned in a keynote but not reinforced in compensation mechanics, it remains aspirational.
Marketplace motion: real or rhetorical
Marketplace is another area where the gap between narrative and execution becomes obvious.
Is the sales team trained on how to structure private offers? Do they understand how to leverage pre-committed cloud budgets? Are there defined workflows for marketplace approvals and incentive stacking?
Or is marketplace framed as a branding milestone rather than a commercialization motion?
Listing on a marketplace does not create revenue. Operationalizing marketplace into deal strategy does.
If sellers leave SKO without clarity on how ecosystem motions accelerate their quota, marketplace will remain underutilized.
Does leadership connect ecosystem to quota?
Perhaps the most important moment at any SKO is when the CRO explains how the company will hit its number.
Does that explanation include ecosystem influenced revenue as a structural driver? Is there clarity on what percentage of pipeline is expected to be partner aligned? Are account mapping and joint planning embedded into territory strategy?
If partnerships are material to revenue attainment, they should be visible in the math, not just in the messaging.
Otherwise, the organization is relying on leverage without designing for it.
Leverage must be engineered
There is nothing wrong with celebrating revenue at SKO. Revenue is the outcome. But leverage determines how sustainable and scalable that revenue will be. If partnerships are not embedded into your sales kickoff, they are not embedded into your revenue engine.
Alignment between sales, product, finance, and partnerships does not happen organically. It requires deliberate system architecture. Compensation, enablement, governance, and marketplace strategy must reinforce the same motion.
If you are unsure whether your partner motion is structurally aligned with your sales goals, start with data.
Take the Ecosystem Readiness Assessment to evaluate how embedded partnerships truly are in your revenue engine. If the results reveal misalignment, my team works directly with CEOs and CROs to design ecosystem strategies that drive measurable quota attainment, not just partnership activity. Connect with us.
Revenue is celebrated in January. Leverage determines what happens in December.
