Ali Chehab

The way I think about partnerships has always been less about maintaining relationships and more about building an ecosystem that can actually produce revenue.

At the center of that ecosystem is always the customer, but around the customer are a lot of moving parts: field sellers, partner managers, solution architects, funding programs, marketplace motions, resellers, systems integrators, and internal teams. None of those groups report to you directly, but all of them affect whether a deal moves or dies. My job is to understand how those pieces fit together and get them moving in the same direction.

That usually starts before there is even a real opportunity. I try to understand where the momentum already is — which sellers are active, which partners already have credibility, which technical teams are involved, and which funding programs or marketplace motions can reduce friction. From there I build relationships at the individual level with the people who matter most, so that when something surfaces, I'm already in the conversation instead of asking for an introduction at the last second.

I also treat the field map as an engineered asset, not a rolodex — segmented by role, vertical, and geography, deduplicated and enriched on a schedule, because a targeting engine is only as good as its data. Once I'm inside the motion, the work becomes operational: account maps, repeatable co-sell workflows, partner-ready sales assets, clean partner-of-record attribution, and a reporting cadence that shows what's working and what's just noise.

A lot of the best opportunities don't start as clean product sales — they start as ambiguous business problems. In those deals, the work begins with understanding the problem, mapping stakeholders, defining the technical architecture, aligning partner funding, and clearing procurement, often before an SOW exists. That's the part of the work I like most: not just keeping a partnership alive, but creating the conditions for one to work in the first place.