VP Partnerships and VP Channel Sales recruitment

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.

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.

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.