Case study
Five placements in five months for Unitary AI
Five placements in five months for Unitary AI while its commercial functions were being established.
Read the case study- 5
- Placements
- 5 months
- Elapsed across the programme
Leadership Search
VP Partnerships and VP Channel Sales recruitment
Search for the leader who builds revenue through other companies — alliances, resellers, marketplaces and co-sell — for venture-backed SaaS and AI businesses in the US and EMEA.
100+
GTM placements over five years
35–50%
Candidate response rates from targeted outreach
25%
Of placements at executive-search level
10 days
Average to identify the ideal candidate after intake
Partnerships is the GTM appointment most often hired for the wrong reason. When direct sales is under plan, a partner leader is asked to compensate for it — and inherits a motion that has nothing repeatable to multiply.
We recruit VP Partnerships, VP Alliances and VP Channel Sales for Seed to Series C SaaS and AI companies, and we start by testing whether partner revenue is realistic at your stage before running the search.
Which partnership leader you are actually hiring
- VP Partnerships / Alliances
- Technology and strategic alliances: integrations, co-sell with platform vendors, marketplace listings and joint pipeline with companies far larger than yours.
- VP Channel Sales
- Indirect revenue through resellers, VARs, distributors and systems integrators, with partner quota, margin structure and enablement to build.
- Ecosystem / marketplace lead
- Depth in one ecosystem — AWS, Azure, GCP, Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, Databricks — where the listing, the co-sell mechanics and the field relationships are the job.
- First partnerships hire
- Player-coach at Series A or B: sources partners, closes the first co-sell deals personally, and writes the programme rather than inheriting one.
What we assess
Partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue with real numbers behind it, including how each was defined and who audited it. Partner leaders who report logos signed rather than revenue produced are visible in the first twenty minutes.
Then the named ecosystems: which partner field teams they personally worked with, which co-sell deals they closed and what the margin or referral structure looked like. Then the internal question — how they earned direct sellers' trust rather than competing with them for credit.
AI companies specifically
For AI companies the ecosystem is usually the fastest route to enterprise credibility: cloud marketplaces, model and data platforms, and SI partners who own the implementation work customers cannot resource internally.
That makes technical fluency non-negotiable. We screen for leaders who can hold an architecture conversation with a partner's solutions team and still negotiate commercial terms in the same week.
When not to hire this role yet
If direct sales has not yet produced a repeatable motion, a partnerships leader will spend year one building relationships that nobody can convert. We will tell you that at intake, and often recommend a sales hire first.
Where partner revenue is genuinely the constraint, the appointment is one of the highest-leverage hires in go-to-market — which is exactly why the evidence bar should be high.
Selected clients
- Cursor
- Planhat
- Branch
- Unitary AI
- Sweep
- Anima Health
- FullStory
- Acoustic
- Optimizely
- VertoFX
Common questions
- What is the difference between VP Partnerships and VP Channel Sales?
- Partnerships and alliances leaders build joint value and co-sell motions with technology partners, usually measured on partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline. Channel sales leaders build indirect revenue through resellers and integrators, carry partner quota, and own margin and enablement. Some candidates do both well; most are stronger at one.
- When should we hire our first partnerships leader?
- Once direct sales is repeatable and a specific ecosystem is already producing inbound interest or referrals you cannot service. Hiring partnerships to fix a weak direct motion is the most common and most expensive mistake in this function.
- Do you recruit partnerships roles below VP level?
- Yes. Partner Managers, Alliance Managers and Channel Account Managers run as standard searches; VP and Director appointments run through Leadership Search with market mapping and confidentiality handled accordingly.
- Where do you recruit partnership leaders?
- Across the United States and EMEA. Ecosystem relationships are regional, so we map candidates against the partner field teams in the territory you are selling into rather than a global average.
Ready to talk about the hire?
Tell us the roles, the markets and the stage. You will get a straight answer on whether we are the right partner, and a market view either way.