War-game a partner co-sell motion before attribution rules, handoff scripts, and joint pipeline claims harden into how every shared deal gets worked.
Partner co-sell motions fail when the playbook invents attribution clarity CRM never had, when deals dual-count the same opportunity as sourced and as influenced, when sales still promises exclusive co-sell in private Slack, and when partner ops cannot show which handoffs actually cleared under the published path. A neat co-sell flowchart is not evidence.
Lock one motion
State the proposed attribution rules and handoff SLAs, which partner tiers and regions it covers, who owns registration audit and conflict resolution, what success looks like after two quarters of co-sell win rate and conflict rate, and the kill criteria if shadow registrations or fairness disputes past a named threshold. Attach the partner roster, sample registration logs, conflict queues, and the measured path from intro to booked deal. If sales, partner ops, and finance disagree on whether the motion buys pipeline or just deferred credit fights, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any tier still lacks a named owner or a verified conflict path.
Seats that should attack it
- Channel partner. Fear that "joint sell" still means unpaid lead work with no named owner.
- Partner ops. Registration math that looks clean while conflict queues have no weekend owner.
- Sales. Talk tracks that invent exclusivity the agreement never wrote.
- Finance. Margin language that still hosts retired rebate rates.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Optional legal seat if co-sell agreement language binds the form. Same pack for every seat.
Run the private passes
Feed Pingpong the motion draft and exhibits. First pass steelmans the attribution ladder. Later passes attack from the seats above. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer rules, a published conflict SLA, or a hold. Delete invented "partners already know how co-sell works" claims and dual-counted pipeline rates.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if a large partner screenshots mismatched registration terms, if sales still teaches unwritten exclusivity, or if partner ops cannot list the open conflict cohort. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before you publish it. Separate a partner co-sell motion from a channel partner deal or a partner margin grid so each decision stays testable.
Ask every seat to mark which handoffs are optional in practice. Optional conflict audits become skipped within a month if nobody names the owner and the time box. Related: pretend you are the partner manager, pretend you are the channel partner, war-game a partner enablement kit, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.