Partnerships is a lot messier than it looks - and that messiness is actually the opportunity. At a Partnership Leaders breakfast during Dreamforce, Greg Portnoy, Founder and CEO of Euler, made a clear case: partnerships are objectively the most efficient go-to-market channel, yet the function is starved of the software and measurement tooling other GTM teams take for granted.

If you’ve worked in partnerships, you know the pattern: data scattered across emails, spreadsheets, Slack threads, and legacy PRMs; manual deal intake processes; mediocre enablement that asks partners to do the impossible - learn your product, learn how to pitch it, and keep selling it as their priorities shift. Greg put it plainly:

“There’s data and workflows and touch points and activity all over the place. How do you, if you’re not measuring all of that … bring that information together in some sort of a way that’s actionable and reliable?”

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That question points to the three practical levers every head of partnerships should be focused on right now:

* Measurement and ROI storytelling. You can’t ask for budget without an ROI story. Greg argues that when partnerships are measured properly they can show outsized returns - a rationale boards and C-level execs understand. Euler’s early market results reinforce this: partner-sourced revenue growth, partner portfolio expansion, and meaningful time savings per partner manager. Those numbers shift the conversation from “maybe” to “invest here.”

* Remove friction where the work happens. People live in Slack, not in separate portals. Greg described Deal Flow AI - an integration that lets teams register partner referrals directly from email or Slack without forcing partners to fill forms. The idea is elegantly simple: meet people where they work, eliminate manual handoffs, and capture the structured data you need downstream. That single change alone raises deal velocity and keeps pipeline honest.

* Use AI to make partners productive, not to add another tool. This is the part that excited Greg most. Partnerships haven’t seen the same tooling investment as sales and marketing, so they’re sitting on low-hanging fruit for AI. If your partner portal isn’t just a document repository but an AI agent that knows your enablement, agreements, commissions, and pipeline, it can answer questions, coach partners at the point of need, and dramatically reduce the enablement burden on you and your partners. In Greg’s words, that AI becomes “your partnership LLM” - it’s the difference between telling partners to take a training and giving them an answer when they need it.

What does this all add up to? For practitioners, it’s a shift from chasing vanity metrics to engineering predictable outcomes.

For leaders, it’s a path to budget and headcount: demonstrate deliverable ROI and the company will invest.

For partners and reps, it’s less friction, faster deals, and easier enablement.

Three practical moves to start this week:

* Audit where partner signals originate (email, Slack, meetings) and instrument the easiest capture points first.

* Define two measurable partner outcomes you want this quarter - for example, partner-sourced pipeline and time saved per partner manager - and instrument them.

* Pilot an enablement/answering agent for one vertical or partner cohort; measure time to answer and follow-on win rates.

Partnerships are maturing from hype to craft. The best teams are no longer guessing what “good” looks like - they’re building repeatable frameworks for partner selection, enablement, and measurement.

Greg’s message at Dreamforce was straightforward and energizing: stop treating partnerships like a black box. Instrument it, reduce friction where people actually work, and let AI drive the heavy lifting so people can focus on strategic relationship and outcomes.

The result is predictable revenue, faster deal cycles, and a much stronger case for investment.

If you’re a head of partnerships or a CPO, the experiment to run isn’t exotic: capture signals where partners live, measure the outcomes you care about, and give partners the right answers at the point of need.

Do that and you’ll not only scale the channel — you’ll make the business case to scale it with you.

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