The channel built its business on selling products, but the future belongs to partners that can be trusted to deliver outcomes.

The channel was created to sell products. Vendors needed an effective and economical means for covering the total addressable market and funneling products to their customers. The value was in the box.

That era is coming to an end. It’s now about outcomes.

Outcome-based selling isn't a future trend for the channel. For some partners, it's already the operating model, and everyone else is racing to catch up. The clearest evidence is in categories like financial systems, where practitioners have always had to understand a customer's business before they understood the tech stack. That inverts the usual channel logic. Instead of teaching partners to translate product into value, the strongest ecosystems start with the customer’s problem and work backward to the platform.

AI is accelerating the shift. As it compresses implementation timelines and raises customer expectations, the partners who win won’t be the ones with the most certifications. They'll be the ones that can be trusted advisors on outcomes, not just resellers of features. Trust matters more in categories like accounting and finance, where the cost of being wrong is existential for the customer.

The bigger structural point: Transaction-based selling is migrating to marketplaces, and the strategic value in the channel is consolidating around advisory relationships. Partners that still measure their worth by who “owns” the transaction are optimizing for the part of the business that’s about to become commoditized. The partners that thrive will be the ones motivated and measured on durable, predictable customer growth — not margin on a deal.

For vendors watching from outside this shift, the lesson is uncomfortable: Outcome-based selling isn't a program you bolt onto an existing partner structure. It requires partners that already live inside the businesses of their customers.

That's the world Gretchen O'Hara is navigating at Sage, where she serves as channel chief and leads channel ecosystems and professional services. In this episode of “Changing Channels,” she joins Larry Walsh to explain why Sage’s deeply practitioner-based partner network puts the company on the leading edge of a shift that the rest of the industry is only beginning to make.