Why “Best Practices” Are Killing Partnership Innovation

Best practices are the starting point, not the finish line.

Best practices optimize for safety, not advantage.

Most partnership leaders are doing everything they are supposed to do.
They have tiering models. Enablement tracks. QBRs. MDF. Co-sell motions.

And yet, very few partnership organizations feel truly innovative.

That is not an execution problem. It is a thinking problem.

What best practices are really designed to do

Best practices exist to reduce risk.
They help organizations avoid obvious mistakes.
They create consistency and make decisions easier to defend.

They answer questions like:

• What do mature partner teams do?

• How do we avoid getting blamed if this fails?

• What will sound reasonable in a leadership meeting?

Those are safe questions. They are also the wrong ones if you are trying to create advantage.

When everyone follows the same playbook, nobody stands out. You get baseline competence, not differentiation.

A moment when best practice thinking broke down for me

Earlier in my career, I worked in distribution. We were building a cloud marketplace at a time when most of the business still revolved around traditional licensing and discounting.

The dominant belief was simple and deeply ingrained.
Customers buy based on price.
Partners win by squeezing discounts.
Sales teams protect margin by making deals hard to compare.

That belief shaped every internal conversation.

As we designed the marketplace, I pushed for something that went directly against that thinking. I argued that we should make Office 365 incredibly easy to buy, even if it meant less flexibility around discounting.

Sales hated it.

The immediate feedback was loud and clear:

• We will lose deals if we cannot discount.

• Customers will go somewhere cheaper.

• This will hurt our margins.

All reasonable concerns. All rooted in best practice logic.

Thinking differently about what customers actually value

The bet I was making was simple.
People would value ease of buying more than saving a dollar.

Instead of optimizing for maximum deal control, we optimized for:

• Clear pricing

• Simple purchasing

• Minimal friction

We made it easy to transact. Easy to understand. Easy to repeat.

And guess what happened.

People bought it.
A lot of people bought it.

Not only did adoption increase, but margins improved. The simplicity reduced friction, increased volume, and created a buying experience customers preferred. We did not win because we were cheaper. We won because we were easier.

That was not a best practice at the time. It was a reframing of the problem.

Why best practices struggle to produce innovation

Best practices are backward looking. They are built from what worked before, often in different markets under different conditions.

They optimize for:

• Predictability

• Control

• Internal comfort

• Low variance outcomes

What they do not optimize for is leverage.

In partnerships, this shows up everywhere:

• Tiering models that reward history instead of behavior

• QBRs that review activity instead of momentum

• Enablement that pushes content instead of changing execution

• Co-sell motions that protect ownership instead of accelerating deals

All of this is safe. None of it creates advantage.

Innovation starts with reframing, not copying

Real partnership innovation does not come from asking what other companies are doing. It comes from asking different questions.

Questions like:

• What is actually hard for our partners today?

• Where does friction slow revenue more than price ever could?

• What would customers choose if buying were genuinely simple?

Those questions rarely have templates. They force design decisions instead of imitation.

In my marketplace example, the reframing was straightforward.
We were not competing on discount.
We were competing on ease.

That shift changed everything.

A better test than “is this a best practice?”

Instead of asking:
Is this a best practice?

Ask:

• What advantage does this create?

• What gets meaningfully easier for partners or customers?

• What belief are we challenging by doing this?

Best practices will help you avoid mistakes.
They will help you defend decisions.
They will help you look competent.

They will not help you win.

Partnership innovation lives on the other side of safety, where you design for how people actually behave, not how spreadsheets say they should.

Best practices optimize for safety, not advantage.

And advantage is the whole point.