When a deal stalls, the answer is almost always sitting in one of three places. The framework just tells you where to look.
Every partnership I've built, and every one that's stalled, has been carried by the same thing.
Not process, not product, not pricing. Trust. And trust operates on three distinct levels simultaneously.
After a decade managing enterprise partnerships across retail, SaaS and technology, I've noticed that the same things trip accounts up, over and over. It's almost never the product. It's rarely the commercial terms. It's almost always trust, operating at a level that nobody's paying attention to.
When I inherited accounts that were struggling, and I've inherited a few, the first thing I always asked was the same: where's the trust broken? Sometimes it was the product. Sometimes it was the company behind it. And sometimes it was simpler than that: the partner just didn't feel like anyone was on their side.
The framework below breaks down each dimension, what healthy looks like, and how to spot when something's wrong. The scorecard at the bottom is practical: score your current accounts honestly, and you'll know exactly where to spend your energy.
Does your champion actually believe in what you're selling?
This is the foundation. When all is said and done, does your partner think the product is a genuinely good idea? Not on paper. Not in the meeting. In their gut, the conviction that carries when they're defending the decision to a sceptical CFO at nine in the morning.
Because at some point your champion has to walk into a room without you. They have to sell this upwards, sideways, and sometimes across to people who didn't ask for the product and aren't sure they want it. If they don't believe in it themselves, that conversation isn't going to go well. And it's not a conversation you'll ever be in the room for.
The tell is in how objections get raised. When a partner says they need to talk to someone else before moving forward, that's rarely a process issue. It's a trust issue. A champion who believes in the product finds a way to move things forward. One who doesn't finds reasons why they can't. The reasons are always different. The pattern is always the same.
Ask yourself: if your champion was having dinner with a peer at a competitor company, would they mention your product? Would they recommend it? Would they defend it if challenged?
If the answer is no, or if you're not sure, that's where the work starts. Not on the renewal. Not on the expansion. On convincing the person who's supposed to be your internal advocate that they're backing the right horse.
The product dimension is about whether what you're selling is genuinely a good idea for them. If the answer is yes, almost everything else gets easier.
Does your partner trust the organisation behind the product?
This is the hardest dimension to control and the easiest to underestimate. Partners don't just buy a product and a relationship with you. They buy into an organisation. Its direction. Its values. How it makes decisions when things get hard and nobody's watching.
This shows up most clearly at renewal time. When a contract is up for review, a partner's confidence in the product might be high and their relationship with you might be strong. But if they've watched the company make decisions that felt wrong, rushed announcements, policy changes that weren't explained, support that disappeared under pressure, that erodes something that's very difficult to rebuild.
For anyone working in partnerships or customer success: the standards you walk past are the standards you accept. If your company is making decisions that let your partners down, decisions you know aren't right for the customer, you have both the standing and the responsibility to say so. Internally, clearly, and without apology. That's not disloyalty. That's the job.
Ask yourself: if your company made a decision tomorrow that your partner disagreed with, would they call you about it? Or would they quietly start looking for alternatives?
If they'd call you, the company trust dimension is strong. They see the relationship as a place to resolve things. If they'd go quiet, something has eroded, and it probably happened before you noticed.
Company trust is rebuilt slowly and lost quickly. The most important thing you can do is give your partner a reason to believe the organisation is on their side, not just taking their money.
Does your partner trust you?
This one is built, not assumed. And it needs to be built early, because you're starting from zero every time. A new account, a new contact, a new stakeholder, they have no reason to trust you yet. Some of them have reasons not to, based on whoever came before you.
The fastest way to establish credibility in a new partnership is to understand someone's pain and resolve it as quickly as possible. Not promise to resolve it. Actually resolve it. Even something small, turned around quickly and without fuss, tells a partner more about who you are than any deck you could put in front of them.
And if their first concern is that they don't know you at all, that's where you start. You tell them who you are. You state your intent clearly and you follow through on it. Credibility compounds over time, but the foundation has to be laid in the first few conversations, before the first issue, before the first renewal, before you need them to trust you for something that matters.
Ask yourself: if your partner had a problem with the product at 4pm on a Friday, would they call you? Or would they log a ticket and wait until Monday?
The call is the signal. It means they believe you'll pick up, you'll care, and you'll do something about it. That belief doesn't come from a relationship-building meeting. It comes from the ten times you did exactly that, unprompted, before they needed to ask.
Personal trust is the dimension you have the most control over. It's also the one most people underinvest in, because it doesn't show up on a dashboard.
Pick an account you're working on right now. Answer each question honestly. The score will tell you where to focus your energy.
A more personal take on how this framework developed, and what it looks like in practice.
Three Dimensions of a Partnership That Works →