Kim Tremblay, Director of Global Partner Programs, Channels & Alliances at Demandbase, has spent more than 30 years in partnerships. Here is how she keeps the relationship at the center while building the operational engine that turns partner programs into measurable revenue.

Partnerships have a reputation for being soft. Hard to operationalize, hard to measure, easy to dismiss as relationship work that lives outside the revenue conversation.

Kim Tremblay has spent three decades proving the opposite, from large strategic alliances to smaller channel relationships, and now building the technology, service, and OEM partner ecosystem at Demandbase.

Her view is direct. The relationship still matters, but it is no longer enough on its own. Partnerships have always rewarded the people who are good at nurturing relationships and finding the win-win, and that hasn't changed. What has changed is the amount of operational support now required to make those relationships scale.

This is the playbook Kim uses to scale partnerships without losing the relationship that makes them work.

Why Relationships Alone Stop Working

For years, a strong partner manager with good instincts could carry a program. Know the right people, nurture the right relationships, and deals would follow.

That model quietly breaks as a program grows. The number of partners outpaces the number of people who can maintain real relationships, and the motion stalls.

"You can't just use those relationships anymore to get ahead. If you rely on that, your partnerships will fail. You need to make sure that you not only have that win-win-win, but then you have a means to scale it."

The relationship opens the door. What Kim is after is a way to walk through it across an entire ecosystem, not one connection at a time.

The One-Size-Fits-Some Trap

The place this shows up most painfully is enablement. Most partner training is built once and pushed to everyone — what Kim calls "one-size-fits-some" training. A partner on any given day may need something very specific to support a customer, and standard modules rarely fit that moment.

Then there is the speed problem underneath it. When the product moves fast, static content is out of date almost as soon as it ships. Demandbase's platform changes so rapidly that the team can't create and refresh enablement content fast enough to keep up — and the lessons that do exist constantly have to be recreated, creating a snowball effect.

A program built only on relationships and static modules cannot keep up with either the number of partners or the pace of change. That is the gap Kim's playbook is designed to close.

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Kim Tremblay's Playbook for Scaling Partner Revenue

1. Start With Partner Engagement Data, Not Gut Feel

Before deciding where to spend time, Kim's team looks at the data on which partners are actually leaning in. Using their AI pipeline platform, partner managers uncover intent and engagement as they prepare for meetings or hunt for white space.

That visibility changes the starting point of the work. Instead of guessing who is worth the next conversation, the team can see who is engaged, who is interested but not yet worked, and where the white space is.

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2. Surface Partner Signals Inside the Sales Workflow

The second move is connecting partner data to live deals, so sellers act on it in the moment.

Across a business, dozens of conversations touch the partner ecosystem every day, and most never reach the partner team in time. Kim's team closes that gap by making partner context visible to sellers and flagging the right conversations early — so sellers know which partners might be in an account, and partner teams get notified while the deal is still in motion, aligning everyone far earlier in the sales cycle.

The outcome is the kind of number that ends the debate about whether partnerships matter.

"We're seeing partner deals close two times faster across Demandbase than other deals."

3. Use AI to Make Enablement Real Time

To beat the one-size-fits-some trap, Kim is moving enablement away from static modules and toward something closer to real time, using AI to read changes in the platform and build training paths and enablement on the fly to meet partners where they are.

The point is not to replace the team. It is to free them — scaling the program while freeing up capable people to do more valuable work. Kim is clear that this is about augmenting people, not cutting them.

"We're not looking at it like we're going to use AI to get rid of an entire SDR team. We're going to use it to make our SDRs much more effective."

Her team has already put this in front of partners directly. Partners in the program now have an AI agent they can use to find sales plays and the right content, replacing the familiar scramble where a partner emails asking for something and the team goes on a wild goose chase to find it.

4. Recruit Internal Champions

The last piece is not a tool. It is people inside the company who believe in the motion. Kim points to champions in the Demandbase sales org who came from partnering organizations and actively help improve sentiment toward partners across the company.

Data makes partner influence visible. Champions make it believed. Kim's program leans on both.

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What This Approach Produces

The combination of engagement data, in-workflow signals, real-time enablement, and internal champions adds up to a number most partner leaders would take in a heartbeat.

"Over the last two years, we have grown from about 2% to 3% of new logo revenue being with partners to over 23% last year. So that's getting everyone's attention."

Just as important, Kim's posture toward AI is mature rather than experimental. The team is past experimenting for its own sake and instead targets the repetitive, operational tasks where AI can make people more efficient.

That is the shift. Partnerships move from relationship work that happens off to the side, to a measurable revenue motion the whole company can see.

Turning Relationships Into a Repeatable System

Kim's playbook lands on a single idea. The relationship is still the heart of partnerships, but it cannot be the entire system. Engagement data tells you where to focus. In-workflow signals get sellers and partner teams aligned earlier. Real-time enablement keeps partners current. Champions carry the belief across the org.

That shift, from manual relationship work to a repeatable system every seller can act on, is exactly what WorkSpan is built to support.

WorkSpan helps partner and revenue teams operationalize this kind of motion, embedding partner intelligence and co-sell workflows into CRM so partner signals reach every seller and the highest-potential opportunities get attention without manual chasing. Learn how →

Ready to turn partner relationships into a repeatable revenue motion? See how WorkSpan operationalizes partner revenue →