Incentives are a means of shaping partner behavior and performance; understanding their importance is essential to channel management decision-making.
Partners are driven by a combination of market opportunities and incentives. Vendors create products and services that the market either wants or needs. They work with partners because they can’t cover the total addressable market independently. Partners, in turn, work with vendors because they see the same market opportunities.
The challenge under this paradigm is competition. According to the Channelnomics 2025 Channel Forecast for North America, the average partner works with 4.7 primary vendors (those they engage with consistently) and dozens of secondary and tertiary suppliers. Three-quarters of partners say they plan to increase the number of suppliers in their portfolio. That’s a lot of competition.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and opportunity is the father of entrepreneurship. Incentives serve as the bridge that captures partners’ attention and motivates their go-to-market activities in alignment with vendors’ interests. However, vendors often struggle to balance the types of incentives they offer. To understand which incentives matter most, Channelnomics asked the partner community to rank their importance.
The following is a ranking of common channel incentives based on their impact on partner success.
