Partners are inside the part of the buying journey you cannot observe.

The deals that cost you most are not the ones you lose. They are the ones you never knew were happening.

Salesforce’s seventh State of Sales report, published in February and drawn from more than 4,000 sales professionals, found that 94% of sales teams now use partner selling, up from 86% the year before. That is close to universal, and it moved eight points in twelve months. Selling alongside a partner is no longer a channel strategy. It is how selling works.

IDC’s 2026 ecosystem research describes what that does to your visibility. Buyers no longer move along a linear path from vendor to partner. Journeys are fragmented and non-linear, with influence spread across marketplaces, peer communities, embedded AI recommendations and advisory relationships that cut straight across traditional channel boundaries. A large share of the decision is made in rooms you are not in.

Your partners are in those rooms. Which makes the next number the awkward one. In the same Salesforce research, only 40% of partners have full access to their vendor’s AI tools. Nine in ten vendors give partners dedicated tooling of some kind, but most still stop short of giving them the same context their own reps work with.

So the position most programs have engineered is this. Partners are now essential to the deal and a stranger to the data. Information flows out to them as enablement content and comes back as a deal registration, weeks after the decisions that mattered were taken.