Why Are All the Partnership People Getting Fired? The Uncomfortable Truth About a Dying Role

Written By Adrian Maharaj

If you're a VP of Partnerships, Director of Ecosystems, or CPO, you might want to sit down. The career you've built your entire professional life on is transforming under your feet, and most of you aren't prepared for what's coming.

You don't have to look far for the evidence. LinkedIn is a sea of "ex-partnership leaders" scrambling for their next gig. This isn't a coincidence. It's the direct fallout from two years of tech "right-sizing," where, as Crunchbase data shows, over 350,000 tech workers have been laid off since 2023. When companies are forced to cut costs, any department that cannot explicitly prove its ROI is first on the chopping block. That's why so many traditional partnership teams, stuck in a world of relationship-tracking, were an easy target.

And those big partner conferences? Sure, 2024 industry data from Wave Connect shows B2B event attendance has surpassed pre-pandemic numbers. But look who's walking the floor. It's a sea of vendors selling to other vendors, while the actual decision-makers—the new Revenue Architects—are back in the office building revenue models.

Here’s the hard truth: The traditional partnership role is going extinct because it failed to evolve. It got stuck on relationship management instead of becoming about revenue architecture.

Where It All Went Wrong: You Became Vendor Managers, Not Growth Architects

The core problem was this: somewhere along the line, "partnerships" became a glorified vendor management role. Your job became "maintaining relationships," holding quarterly business reviews, and sending out partner newsletters that nobody reads. You became the person who "manages the partners" rather than the person who architects growth. And while you were busy scheduling another kickoff meeting, the rest of the business lapped you. Sales learned to use technology partners directly, Product started building native integrations without your input, Marketing created their own co-marketing playbooks, and Customer Success built their own referral programs. You became the middleman in a world that is actively eliminating middlemen.

The 3 Types of Partnership Pros (And Why 2 Are Doomed)

I see three types of partnership professionals working today, and two of them are finished.

First is The Relationship Manager, and their role is going extinct. This is the person who believes their entire value is in "the relationship." They schedule calls, send holiday gifts, and talk endlessly about "partnership synergies." Their dashboard shows "partner satisfaction scores" instead of revenue. No CFO cares about that. Modern B2B KPI reports are all about Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Pipeline Velocity, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). "Partner satisfaction" isn't even on the list.

Second is The Program Administrator, and their role is being automated. This pro runs the program. They onboard partners, manage the partner portal, and track certifications. They are essentially running an administrative workflow that should have been automated five years ago. Every single task they do can now be handled by software. Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms like Impartner now openly list "automated onboarding," "deal registration," and "training" as standard features. This entire job has become a Zapier workflow.

Third is The Revenue Architect. These are the survivors. They understand that partnerships aren't about relationships—they're about designing systems that generate revenue. They don't manage partners; they architect growth engines. This isn't just a clever name; it's the new reality. It’s why the role of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is expanding to take strategic ownership of the entire partner ecosystem. The goal is, and always was, revenue. The survivors are the ones who have transformed themselves from a cost center into a profit center.

Your Metrics Are Getting You Fired

Look at what you're measuring. If your dashboard is full of vanity metrics like the number of partners signed, those useless partner satisfaction scores, or how many partners you've "trained," you're already on borrowed time. The only metrics that matter are partner-sourced revenue, partner velocity to revenue, partner ROI, and whether your partner-driven CAC is lower than your direct CAC. If you can't tie every partnership activity directly to revenue, you're not in partnerships; you're just expensive overhead. There's a reason the entire Partner Tech industry, from Crossbeam's ROI tracking to Reveal, is built around solving this exact problem.

The Brutal Reality: You're Not Strategic Anymore

Here’s the most uncomfortable truth: most partnership professionals aren't strategic. They're tactical executors of someone else's strategy. When the CEO asks, "What would actually happen if we eliminated the partnership team?" and nobody can articulate a clear business impact beyond "our relationships would suffer," you know the role has lost its strategic importance.

How to Survive the Partnership Apocalypse

If you're still reading, here's your survival guide.

Stop being a "Partnership Person." Your title might say partnerships, but your job is revenue growth. Start introducing yourself as a revenue architect who uses partnerships as a lever, not a partnership manager who hopes for revenue.

Learn Revenue Operations. If you can't model the economic impact of a partnership, build an attribution model, or speak the language of unit economics, you're already obsolete. This is the language your CRO speaks.

Get technical or become irrelevant. The future partnership pro understands APIs, can evaluate integration strategies, and can talk intelligently with the product team.

Own a revenue number. If you don't have a revenue target, you don't have a real job. Volunteer to own a partner-sourced revenue number. Make it aggressive.

Distribute yourself. The most strategic leaders are embedding partnership thinking into Product, Sales, and Marketing, not hoarding it in a silo. Be the one who designs the system, not the one who just operates it.

The New Reality: Partnerships as Systems, Not Departments

The future of partnerships isn't "no partnerships"—it's partnerships everywhere. But it's partnerships as a capability, not a department. The companies winning with partnerships don't have large partner teams; they have products designed for leverage, sales teams trained in ecosystem selling, and technology that makes it all frictionless.

You have a choice. You can continue doing what you've always done—managing relationships, running programs, attending events—and wait for the inevitable restructuring email. Or you can evolve.

The partnership function as you know it is dead. But partnership thinking—embedded, distributed, and revenue-focused—has never been more critical. The question isn't whether partnerships matter. It's whether you will evolve fast enough to matter.

Sources

Adrian Maharaj
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