The Proof · Ground Truth
Six years of real co-sell behavior across 92 partner ecosystems, distilled. Every number below is from the Ground Truth study itself unless a source says otherwise. The through-line: depth beats breadth, and it’s built on purpose, not inherited from scale.
Partners with over half their sellers at Tier 3+ generate roughly 3× more referrals per seller than those below 30%.
Among 45 long-tenured partners, 58% saw inbound share fall and only 7% saw it rise. Inbound turns out to be a structural allocation to cloud-native service providers and strategic silicon vendors, handed down at the executive level and roughly fixed for everyone else. Outbound effort doesn’t buy inbound — depth is the lever you control.
A ~45-seller regional partner posted the dataset’s highest per-seller productivity — focus, not headcount. Boomi shows the same discipline at scale: engaged sellers climbed 35%→65% over four years by stacking an SCA renewal, new competencies, and a Marketplace listing — not one big swing.
The common failure isn’t invisible sellers, it’s concentration. Engagement can be real even when a handful of people are doing the filing — most programs can’t tell which one they’re looking at. Filling in the account-owner field is the cheapest, least glamorous fix in the study, and the one that turns this map into a live read on your own program.
Even the top performers only activate a quarter to a third of their addressable sellers. No one in the data is close to their ceiling — most of the upside is still unclaimed.
Source: Ground Truth study — WorkSpan telemetry across 92 partner ecosystems, 5,709 named sellers, and 229,002 co-sell motions, over six years. Research co-sponsored by AWS; the data is theirs, the interpretation and archetypes are WorkSpan’s. Boomi is named with permission as a published customer story; the study itself doesn’t otherwise identify partners.