The customer stays yours

Ask a business why it will not resell a vendor’s software and the answer is rarely margin. It is channel conflict: the fear that the moment a customer is valuable enough, the vendor goes round the partner, prices direct, and keeps the renewal. Partners who have been through that once do not do it twice.

A programme cannot fix that with a promise, because every programme makes the promise. It can fix it by deciding in writing, before anybody signs, exactly who owns what.

Who owns the customer, by track

Deal registration from the first opportunity

Register an opportunity and it is yours for the length of the sales cycle — exclusive territory or not. That protection does not wait for a certification level or a first year of targets; it applies from the first deal you bring.

And the part most programmes leave until it is too late: you are told which accounts are already ours before you sign anything, not afterwards. Finding out mid-pitch that the prospect is a direct customer is how trust ends in a single meeting.

Every programme promises not to go round its partners. The only version worth anything is written down before the first deal.

Do we sell direct in your territory?

Until a partner is appointed there, yes — a territory with nobody in it still has customers. Once a partner is appointed, deals go through them, and the accounts that were already ours are listed before the agreement is signed so there is no argument later about which is which.

Your standing, on the one track where we hold the contract

A referral partner introduces a client and we run everything after. What they are protecting is not a contract but their reputation with that client. So we do not pitch beyond what they introduced without telling them, and we will not go round them to the client on a later deal — the introduction stays theirs.