Vendors will tell you they need partners. Partners cover the total addressable market, provide services to shared customers, and extend reach that no direct-sales force can match. What vendors are far less likely to tell you is what actually motivates those partners, because most have never stood on the other side of the table.

Scott Goree has. A veteran channel leader, he left the vendor world to run vendor relationships for a large security reseller with more than 600 vendors on its line card. The view from inside changed how he thinks about the job. A vendor launching a new program assumes partners will read every piece of collateral. They won't. Partners care about three things: whether your technology solves their customers' problems, whether profitability is predictable up-front, and whether you're easy to do business with. Fail to live up to any of those three and a partner juggling hundreds of other vendors will simply move on.

The operational reality was another eye-opener for Goree. Every vendor expects its quarter to be treated as the most important ever, but for a partner, every month is somebody's quarter-end. A $10,000 deal sits in a queue with hundreds of others, some of them million-dollar enterprise agreements. Pressuring a partner over a small deal doesn't speed it up. It damages the relationship.

Goree also saw how fragile loyalty can be. It's earned in small drops and lost in a bucket: a deal taken direct, a deal registration voided without explanation, rules of engagement that were never documented. Word travels fast among partner sales teams, and a competitor is usually one pivot away. Even the familiar pitch about 40 points of service margin looks different from the partner's side, where delivering well means investing in training — an investment that pays off only with enough pipeline.

Now the recently appointed channel chief at Delinea, Goree is applying these lessons by removing friction from the go-to-market equation, focusing on program simplification, and partnering with other ISVs on joint demand generation. What Goree has learned applies to all channel chiefs and their teams. In this episode of "Changing Channels," he joins Channelnomics CEO Larry Walsh to discuss.