A strong answer. “The thing to internalise is that I have no authority over them and they have twelve other vendors competing for the same engineers' attention. So enablement uniformly across the partner is wasted — it goes to whoever attends, and attendance is not commitment.

What actually works: find the two or three engineers inside the partner who are genuinely interested, and invest disproportionately in them. A partner becomes productive through individuals, not through programmes.

Then get them a win quickly. Nothing creates commitment like revenue, so I'd rather co-sell one deal alongside them — where I do more of the work than is strictly sustainable — than run four training sessions. After that win, their engineers want to learn because it pays them.

Then make the second deal cheaper for me than the first: reference architecture, a reusable demo, and a deployment runbook shaped for how they work rather than how we do.

And I'd be willing to deprioritise partners who don't engage. Spreading effort evenly across ten partners produces ten unproductive ones, and partner teams are usually judged on sourced revenue rather than on partners enabled.”