I audit channel strategies. It's what I do. And I can tell you that six out of ten partner organizations I look at are running playbooks built for a pre-pandemic, pre-AI, pre-consolidation market. They haven't updated their approach since 2019 and they're wondering why the numbers don't work anymore.
The 2019 playbook went like this: pick three or four vendors, get certified, show up at their conferences, hit your tier thresholds, collect rebates. That worked when vendor programs were stable, product cycles were predictable, and the channel was growing at 8% a year.
None of those things are true anymore. Vendor programs change quarterly now. Product cycles are measured in months. AI is automating the sales motions you used to get paid for. And the channel is consolidating so fast that your biggest competitor last January might be someone else's acquisition target by December.
The new playbook looks different. Specialize ruthlessly. Automate everything that isn't relationship-building. Treat your vendor partnerships the way you'd treat an investment portfolio, with regular rebalancing and hard stop-losses when the ROI goes negative.
If your strategy still has "attend vendor SKO" as a line item and nothing about AI enablement, data sovereignty, or security-led selling, you're not running a strategy. You're running a habit.