Jay McBain, Chief Analyst for Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems at Omdia, recently published his Q4 2025 ProgramWatch findings — a quarterly review his team runs tracking program changes across major vendors in hardware, software, cloud, and cybersecurity. It's one of the most useful signals in the industry for understanding where the channel is actually heading, as opposed to where people say it's heading.
One observation stood out to me more than any other in his summary. Buried between the AI-in-enablement news and the M&A commentary was this:
That's a significant statement. Deal registration has been the foundational mechanic of partner compensation for decades — and it has almost universally meant one thing: protection and credit for bringing in a new customer. The assumption baked into that model is that the primary value a partner delivers is customer acquisition. Everything else — renewals, expansions, advisory services, lifecycle management — happens in a grey zone where partner contributions are often acknowledged but rarely formally compensated.
That's starting to change. And understanding why it's changing — and what it means for how programs need to be built — is worth spending some time on.
Why Deal Registration Was Always a Partial Picture
The original logic of deal registration made sense in a world where the sales motion was largely linear: partners find prospects, develop opportunities, close deals, collect margins. The value was front-loaded, the transaction was discrete, and the registration system reflected that.
But that's not how most B2B software and technology buying works anymore. Subscription models have made renewal a revenue event that is just as significant — sometimes more significant — than the initial sale. Expansion and upsell within existing accounts often dwarfs new logo revenue at scale. And the advisory, assessment, and implementation work that partners do throughout the customer lifecycle is frequently what determines whether a customer renews at all.
Partners know this. They've been doing renewal work, running QBRs, managing customer health, and influencing expansion decisions for years — largely without formal recognition in the program structure. The deal registration system they operate within was designed for a different era of selling, and it has never caught up.
The result is a misalignment that creates real problems. Partners who invest heavily in customer success and lifecycle management aren't being compensated for that investment in any structured way. That reduces the incentive to do it well. And vendors lose visibility into the partner contribution that's actually protecting their recurring revenue base.
What Expanding Deal Registration Actually Looks Like
The shift McBain is describing isn't a single policy change — it's a set of structural updates that different vendors are approaching differently. But a few patterns are emerging.
Renewal Protection
The most straightforward evolution is extending deal registration to cover renewals. A partner who manages a customer relationship, drives adoption, and positions the renewal should be able to register that activity and receive protection and compensation — just as they would for a new logo. Some vendors are already doing this. The mechanics vary: some offer a flat renewal incentive, others tie compensation to on-time renewal rates or expansion attached to the renewal event.
Assessment and Advisory Registration
A growing number of vendors are creating registration pathways for the consultative work that precedes a sale or a renewal — health assessments, architecture reviews, readiness evaluations. This is a meaningful shift because it acknowledges that partner value creation often happens well before a formal opportunity exists in the CRM. Compensating for this work changes partner behavior in exactly the right direction: toward proactive customer engagement rather than reactive deal chasing.
Lifecycle Services Recognition
The broadest version of this evolution is building formal recognition into the program for the full range of services partners deliver across the customer lifecycle — implementation, adoption support, managed services, ongoing advisory. This is more complex to operationalize than renewal protection, but it's the version that most fully aligns partner incentives with customer outcomes.
The Operational Implications for Your Program
If you're running or building a partner program, this shift creates both an opportunity and an obligation. The opportunity is to differentiate your program by formally recognizing partner contributions that your competitors are still ignoring. The obligation is to build the infrastructure that makes that recognition credible and scalable.
A few things this requires in practice:
Infrastructure Change 1
Customer lifecycle visibility
You can't compensate partners for renewal and lifecycle contributions if you can't see what they're doing. That means connecting partner activity data to customer health data — understanding which partners are actively engaged in which accounts, and what impact that engagement has on retention and expansion. Most PRMs weren't built for this. It's a data architecture problem as much as a program design problem.
Infrastructure Change 2
Expanded registration mechanics
The registration system needs to be able to handle new types of claims — renewal registrations, assessment registrations, lifecycle service registrations — with appropriate validation workflows for each. What counts as a qualifying renewal engagement? What documentation is required for an advisory registration? These rules need to be clear, fair, and enforceable before you can roll out expanded registration at scale.
Infrastructure Change 3
Updated partner metrics and scorecards
If you expand what you compensate, you need to expand what you measure. A partner's renewal contribution rate, their customer health influence score, their lifecycle services attach — these need to become first-class metrics in how you evaluate partner performance and tier status. A scorecard that only looks at new logo contribution will systematically undervalue the partners doing the most important work in your customer base.
Infrastructure Change 4
Enablement that covers the full lifecycle
Partners can't deliver strong renewal and lifecycle outcomes if they're only enabled on how to sell the initial product. Enablement needs to cover customer success fundamentals, renewal conversation frameworks, expansion positioning, and how to run effective customer health reviews. That's a meaningfully different curriculum than what most partner enablement programs currently deliver.
The Bigger Signal: From Margins to Multipliers
McBain closes his summary with a line that I think captures where the whole industry is heading: "The winners won't be the programs with the most tiers. They'll be the programs that make partners faster, more accurate, and more profitable across the full customer lifecycle. The move from margins to multipliers is in full swing."
The deal registration evolution is one manifestation of that shift. When you extend registration to cover renewals, assessments, and lifecycle services, you're not just adding new compensation triggers — you're signaling a fundamental reorientation of what the partner relationship is for. It's no longer primarily about customer acquisition. It's about the full revenue motion across the customer lifetime.
That reorientation has implications for everything: how you recruit partners, how you tier them, how you enable them, how you measure them, and how you compensate them. The programs that are getting ahead of this now — building the infrastructure, updating the mechanics, expanding the recognition model — are going to have a structural advantage over those that are still optimizing for deal registration in its original, transaction-only form.
The channel has always been a lagging indicator of how buyers actually buy. Buyers moved to subscription and lifecycle models years ago. The programs are finally catching up.
How is your program handling renewals and lifecycle contribution today? I'd love to hear what's working — connect on LinkedIn.
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