Most partnership webinars have a vendor talking about partners. This one put a vendor and its own reseller on the same screen. Sharkdom (Deepak hosting, Akshunya presenting) sat with AIGTM Channel (Sanjay Dubey, founder, and Rajshree Bhattacharya, retention alliance partner) and talked through how a reseller partnership actually runs, including the awkward parts.
The session had two halves: why resell instead of build, and what resellers really need from vendors. It closed with a live demo of Sharkdom’s MCP connectors.
Key Takeaways
- Build vs buydon’t reinvent the wheel. Sanjay looked at the big international PRM and partner OS platforms before choosing Sharkdom. His reasons were the depth of the partner ops platform and the MCP connectors for Claude and ChatGPT. Joint value proposition is core to AIGTM, so it made sense to partner instead of building.
- Know what kind of reseller you are. Sanjay split them into pure margin resellers, bundlers, and value-added resellers. AIGTM is a VAR. They add their own playbooks and field experience on top of the platform, the “2+2=5” idea.
- The reseller’s brand goes first. The vendor’s job is to make that easy and show up second.
- Attribution is sacrosanct. It should be written into the contract. Sanjay’s point was that trust between vendor and reseller matters more than the clause, because the goal is to win together, even for trophy accounts where sales teams overlap.
- Prove value before you defend price. AIGTM runs a free health check for new clients and uses a value calculator that shows ROI on every service and workflow. Rajshree’s analogy: you can’t promise a student at 20% a 90% next semester. Find the gaps first, then set honest expectations.
- Support is a retention play. Give every customer a dedicated account manager and a direct line (WhatsApp, Slack, Teams). Treat a downtime or error as a chance to retain the customer. Decide who handles what before the first client goes live, not during an incident.
- Data safety belongs in the contract from day one. That includes any third-party vendors involved.
- Vendors should be upfront about loose ends. Every product has them. Resellers want to hear it as an extended sales team, because that trust flows through to the end customer.
- Day one, write down transparent value creation. Be honest about bugs and gaps. Sanjay said that transparency is what has helped AIGTM retain and grow clients.
- Onboarding is where clients know what they want but not the process. Keep it simple and clear, then keep monitoring and communicating after go-live.
