Vendor Tiering Locks Out Small Partners: Anurag Agrawal on Allocation, Not Capability

The average channel partner will grow 11% next year. That number hides everything worth knowing.

Partners under $10M are projecting 8.4% growth. Partners over $500M are projecting 16.8%. Same market, two populations, half speed and full speed — and according to Techaisle’s 2026 Global Channel Partner Survey of 5,450 firms across 24 countries, only about half of that gap is the physics of being small.

The other half gets decided every quarter, in lead routing meetings and tier threshold reviews, by people who mostly don’t know they’re deciding it. 41% of partners above $500M sit in the top tier of their primary vendor program. 2% of partners under $10M do. Twenty percent of large partners rate the leads their vendors send as excellent; six percent of small ones do — same vendors, same demand gen engines, different output.

Anurag Agrawal, Founder and Chief Global Analyst at Techaisle, joins Dave Sobel to separate the part of the growth gap nobody chose from the part somebody allocated. We get into what a security or AI practice actually costs to stand up, why AI-enabled partner portals may be hard-coding last year’s allocation into next year’s, and whether “pick two or three vendors and go deep” is real advice or the only sentence left. We also put Techaisle’s global survey next to Business of Tech’s own community tracking, where vendor support quality has gone from a non-topic to one of the most-discussed — and most negative — themes of the year.

Anurag has spent three decades covering the SMB, midmarket, and partner ecosystem, after building research practices at IDC and Gartner. His work is at techaisle.com.

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