The Honest Conversation Nobody Else Is Having
Every founder reads the analyst reports. Every sales leader nods along in the conference sessions. Partnerships are the future. Ecosystems are everything. Co-selling is the key to unlocking faster growth, bigger deals, and stickier customers.
And yet, ask those same founders and sales leaders whether they're actually banking on partner-sourced revenue to hit their number this quarter, and the answer is almost always the same: no.
Why? Because it's never been reliable. Because it's always been treated as a nice-to-have. Because nobody actually knows how to make it work.
That's the conversation this episode is built around. Alex Buckles has spent 20 years in enterprise sales, in the SAP ecosystem, the Adobe ecosystem, running and exiting two professional services companies, and figured out early in his career that if he wanted deal flow from partners, he had to earn it. That realisation eventually became Forecastable, a company whose only measure of success is pipeline production through co-sell motions.
What You'll Hear in This Episode
Why the instinct to hire a partnerships professional first is wrong
When a sub-150 person company decides to get serious about partnerships, the first move is almost always to bring in someone with a traditional partnerships background. Alex argues this is the wrong call, not because those people aren't valuable, but because what you actually need at that stage is proof of concept, not infrastructure. A junior AE or an SDR with the right playbook can prove repeatability faster and cheaper than six months of PRM setup and deal registration frameworks.
The co-sell door opener and why discovery calls don't cut it
The most powerful concept in this episode is what Alex calls the co-sell door opener: a high-value experience you invite the prospect into rather than a pitch you push at them. Think of it like a $5,000 event that the vendor covers, limited seats, relevant to a specific pain, designed to create genuine engagement rather than manufactured urgency. It doesn't feel like a sales motion because, done right, it isn't one.
The three types of value anyone ever sells
Fix something. Prevent something. Improve something. That's it. And when you're building co-sell plays, Alex argues the fix is almost always the most powerful place to start. If the prospect has a raging toothache, don't pitch them a one-year dental plan.
Why 60% of pipeline dies in no decision — and what's really behind it
Marcus and Alex dig into something most sales training doesn't touch: buyer safety. Not qualification. Not discovery. The deeper question of whether the person sitting across from you can actually afford, professionally, politically, emotionally, to make this decision. When you ignore that question, you end up with a pipeline full of deals that were never going anywhere, a constipated middle of funnel, and a close rate that would make any CFO reach for the antacids.
The second room problem
80 to 90 percent of the sale happens without you in it. The internal conversations, the allocation committees, the corridor conversations between stakeholders, none of that is visible to the vendor. Which means your champion has to carry your story, unedited and unaccompanied, into rooms you'll never see. The question isn't whether your deal is qualified on paper. It's whether every stakeholder in that buying committee would go to bat for you when you're not there.
What great partner enablement actually looks like
It's not onboarding decks and quarterly business reviews. It's getting in front of the frontline manager with a win story, asking for 15 minutes on their weekly team call, and showing up with something their reps can use in the field that week. Ghost-written outreach. Account development research. Win wires in shared Slack channels. Perpetual mindshare, that's what you're actually after.
Demos: mostly a waste of time
Alex's take on this is blunt. Once you've given a demo, the buyer has locked in their view of you. You've answered a bunch of curiosities, and they may ghost you. Save the demo for last. Use it to confirm the order, not to create one. If it won't change a stakeholder's decision, don't do it.
Three Takeaways You Can Use Tomorrow
1. Start with the interview, not the one-pager. Before you build any co-sell playbook, get the most trusted systems integrator in the room and ask them what makes them different. Real conversations produce better plays than merged marketing decks every time.
2. Know who owns the problem and who owns the outcome — they're almost never the same person. In most organisations, the partnership professional owns the problem but has no budget and limited authority. The sales leader owns the outcome but views partnerships as fluffy. Bridging those two people explicitly — not hoping it happens organically — is what gets deals done.
3. Ask yourself the second room question for every stakeholder. If this person were in a room with their boss right now and you weren't there, would they go to bat for you? If you can't answer yes with confidence, you've got more work to do.
About Alex Buckles
Alex is the CEO and co-founder of Forecastable, a professional services company that stands up partner programs and co-sell motions that produce measurable pipeline. With a background spanning enterprise sales, the SAP and Adobe ecosystems, and two exited professional services businesses — all built through co-selling — Alex brings a perspective on partnerships that is grounded entirely in what produces revenue, not what looks good on a slide.
🔗 Find Alex on LinkedIn or visit forecastable.com for published pricing and use cases.
About The Inquisitor Podcast
The Inquisitor is hosted by Marcus Cauchi and is built around one idea: honest, evidence-based conversations about what actually works in sales, go-to-market, and revenue leadership. No posturing. No vanity metrics. Just the real work.
If this episode was useful, share it with a founder or sales leader who's talking about partnerships but hasn't yet made them produce. That's who this was made for.
