reference · checked 31 Oct 2026

glossary.

69 terms the guides use, each in two or three plain sentences and linked to the guide that explains it properly. Nothing here goes further than the guides do.

market entry3
meetings4
deals12
regulated buyers9
POCs9
choosing partners10
making partners sell21
general1

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95:5 ruleout-of-market buyersmeetings

A heuristic from John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, published with LinkedIn's B2B Institute in 2021: at any moment roughly 95% of potential business buyers are out of the market for a category. Dawes calls the figure an illustration, and the real share depends on how often a category gets bought. For a security vendor it gives a funnel two jobs: be remembered by the many who are not buying this quarter, and be easy to choose for the few who are.

A

active partneractivated partner · productive partnermaking partners sell

A partner with recent, documented customer-facing work, defined in writing before anyone reports on it. The guides use practitioner windows as starting points (90 days of customer-facing activity, or a registered or closed deal in six months) and keep activated, commercially active and productive as separate states. The share of signed partners that are active is the first line of the early-warning table for a failing channel.

Article 21NIS2 Article 21 · Article 21(2)(d) · supply chain securityregulated buyers

The NIS2 article that, as transposed into national law, requires essential and important entities to take cybersecurity risk-management measures. Article 21(2)(d) names supply chain security, and Article 21(3) tells entities to weigh each direct supplier's vulnerabilities and secure development practices. The duty sits with the customer, and a vendor meets it as supplier questionnaires and contract clauses (not legal advice).

B

back-end rebateback-end incentive · growth rebatechoosing partners

Money paid to a partner after the sale, when a condition is met: volume or growth above a baseline, a new end customer, a second product. In a Canalys survey of 130 partners reported by CRN UK, back-end rebates and deal registration ranked as the most valued programme elements. Rebate rules partners can't follow change nobody's behaviour, and a rebate paid on growth steers more than a flat volume rebate, which mostly rewards partners who would have bought anyway.

business casedeals

The buyer's document for the people who were never in your sales cycle: the budget holder's manager, finance, procurement, sometimes a board. For a security purchase the guide values the product as a change in probable loss, a cheaper way to meet an obligation or an insurer-confirmed change in terms, on the buyer's numbers, with a visible haircut and a scenario where adoption is half the plan. The seller's job is to help the champion write it.

buying committeebuying group · buying teamdeals

Everyone who has to be comfortable with a purchase before it is signed, including people the seller never meets. Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 counts 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers in a typical B2B purchase. In a security deal it usually includes the security lead, evaluating engineers, IT, procurement, legal and privacy, finance and a business or board sponsor, with the integrator or reseller among the outside voices.

C

championdeals

The person inside the buyer, often the security lead, who carries your case into meetings you do not attend. The guides treat a champion's support as a starting point: the rest of the committee still has to agree. Give the champion things they can carry, such as a one-page business case, early answers for the people who can stop the deal and a clear recommendation, and send POC results to them before the readout.

channel price waterfallprice waterfallchoosing partners

The chain of prices from the vendor's list price to what the end customer pays: the distributor's buy price, the reseller's buy price and the reseller's selling price. Each layer keeps the gap between what it pays and what it charges. Drawing it for one product shows that the lowest price any route quotes, including your own direct team or website, becomes the market price.

channel-neutral compensationchannel-neutral paychoosing partners

A pay rule under which a direct seller earns the same credit whether a deal closes direct or through a partner. It removes the seller's reason to keep deals away from partners, and some vendors add a small premium when a partner fulfils. Where direct deals pay more, the guide expects partners to stop registering, because registering exposes the deal.

co-sellingco-sellmaking partners sell

Your people working a specific opportunity next to a partner's. The guide rations it with published rules: the deal is registered, the partner has qualified it and the partner's own engineer attends, and then one trigger applies, such as size, a new partner's first deals, a strategic account, displacement of a competitor or complexity. Its measure is the share of deals a partner closes without your engineers.

commitment burn-downcloud consumption commitment · Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitmentmaking partners sell

Paying for software out of a cloud spend the customer has already committed to its provider. Microsoft states that Azure benefit eligible offers count 100% of the pretax amount toward a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, and this is usually why an enterprise asks to buy security software through a marketplace. Promise it only for products that qualify: Microsoft's benefit requires the licence to be used exclusively in Azure.

D

data processing agreementDPAPOCs

The contract terms that govern how a supplier processes personal data for the buyer. If personal data reaches a vendor-hosted POC environment, the vendor is probably a processor under GDPR Article 28 and the terms need signing before the data moves. In practice the slowest part of a security review is often negotiating these terms with procurement and legal, so pre-negotiated terms most customers accept unchanged save the most time.

day-one shortlistmeetings

The list of vendors a buyer has in mind when a purchase starts, before research or contact with sellers. 6sense's 2025 buyer experience report, a vendor survey of about 4,000 B2B buyers, found that the winning vendor was on that list 95% of the time. In European security the list tends to come from peers, partners, people the buyer has met, things they have read and plain explanations of regulation.

deal registrationdeal reg · opportunity registrationchoosing partners

A process in which a partner tells the vendor about a specific opportunity and, once it is approved, gets a better buy price than other partners quoting the same customer and project for a fixed period. In the public partner programme guides of large security vendors, 90 days from approval is the most common setting. It breaks on the vendor's side: slow approvals, two approvals for one deal, a direct team that ignores it and special pricing that erases the differential.

direct creepmaking partners sell

The pattern in which the vendor's own sellers close deals partners had worked or mentioned, and partners answer by registering less. The guide calls it the most expensive channel anti-pattern, with registrations falling while direct deals rise as the early signal. The fix it names is a written direct-accounts list and a channel-neutral pay plan.

discovery-led demodo the last thing first · Great Demo methoddeals

A demo built from discovery that opens on the result the buyer cares about, such as the alert, the audit report or the blocked escalation, then shows the shortest path to it and goes deeper only where someone asks. The rule comes from Peter Cohan's Great Demo method. It suits security products, whose value often shows up as something that did not happen.

E

early-warning indicatorschannel health indicatorsmaking partners sell

A short table of leading channel signals checked monthly against amber and red thresholds: active share of signed partners, registrations against last year, revenue share of the top three partners, POC waiting time, share of deals on special pricing and renewal rate. The thresholds in the guide are practitioner rules, and two ambers at once count as a red.

entry gatePOC entry criteriaPOCs

The list of things that must exist before a POC starts: the problem and its owner, the decision and paper process, named people including the budget owner, a ready environment, the security and legal path, and the commercial consequence of success. The vendor's bargaining power is highest before kickoff. The last item is the one most often skipped, and the one that matters most.

ePrivacy rule on B2B emailePrivacy Directive · Article 13regulated buyers

Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) requires member states to make email marketing to individuals subject to prior consent and leaves the protection of business recipients to each country. The guide describes France allowing role-relevant B2B email with an easy objection in every message, and Germany and Poland requiring consent first. A legitimate interest under the GDPR answers a separate question, so check each country's law with local counsel; this is not legal advice.

F

FAIRFactor Analysis of Information Riskdeals

A method that defines risk as the probable frequency and probable magnitude of future loss and breaks both into factors that can be estimated. In a business case its value is structural: it makes you say which factor the product changes, and present the value as a range. The guide prefers it to multiplying a breach-cost average by a guess.

I

ideal partner profileIPPchoosing partners

A one-page description of the partner most likely to produce repeatable revenue on your product within about a year: attributes, thresholds and disqualifiers. It is built from your own best partners first, ranked by gross profit, then from external evidence. It decides who you recruit, who gets engineer time and who gets digital coverage only.

incumbency protectionmaking partners sell

A better buy price at renewal for the partner that sold and serves the customer, so another partner can't take the renewal by discounting. It is the renewal counterpart of deal registration, and the guide reports published vendor examples clustering around a 10% to 15% suggested advantage. In the EU it is built as a price advantage, and the customer keeps the right to buy elsewhere.

ISO/IEC 27001ISO 27001POCs

A certificate that a supplier's information security management system meets the standard within a stated scope, with the Statement of Applicability saying which controls apply. A newly acquired product, a separate region or a feature built on a third-party model may sit outside that scope. Like a SOC 2 report, it does not test the product in the buyer's own configuration.

J

joint business planJBPmaking partners sell

A one-to-three-page agreement with a partner's leadership on targets, actions and commitments from both sides for 12 months. The row that decides whether it survives is the vendor's own commitments: engineer hours, enablement days, funds, demo licences. As a practitioner estimate, the guide puts a channel team of two to six people at about 8 to 15 plans run well, so keep them for core partners.

K

Kraljic matrixKraljic portfoliodeals

A procurement portfolio tool from Peter Kraljic's 1983 Harvard Business Review article that sorts purchases by business impact and supply-market risk. The quadrant a product lands in largely decides the process: a leverage item faces competition and price pressure, a strategic or bottleneck item gets longer agreements and more weight on risk and fit. If the CISO can't explain why your product differs from the alternative, procurement treats it as a leverage item.

KSCNational Cybersecurity System Actregulated buyers

Poland's National Cybersecurity System Act, amended to transpose NIS2. As published by the Ministry of Digital Affairs on 10 April 2026, the amended act has been in force since 3 April 2026, the adaptation period ends on 3 April 2027 and fines are possible from 3 April 2028, after a warning. Whether a customer is a key or important entity is a question for them and their counsel; dates as of October 2026, not legal advice.

M

MDFmarket development fundsmaking partners sell

Money a vendor gives partners for marketing, usually paid against proof of execution. The often repeated claim that 60% of MDF goes unused has no published study behind it: an August 2026 analysis by Technology Match traced it to a single vendor blog post. The agreed reasons funds stay unspent are pre-approval, co-funding and proof paperwork that cost a small partner more time than the money is worth, and the guide's fix is to fund outcomes such as registered deals.

MPOmultiparty private offermaking partners sell

Microsoft's marketplace construct in which the vendor creates an offer and sends it to a channel partner, which finalises it and presents it to the customer. The customer accepts in the Azure portal, and Microsoft bills the customer and pays both. For the whole purchase to count towards the customer's Azure commitment, the product must be co-sell eligible.

MQLmarketing qualified lead · lead scoringmeetings

A lead scored as ready to hand to sales, the unit of the US volume playbook: generate leads at scale, score them, pass the qualified ones on. The guide on that playbook argues that a lead score built on one person's clicks does not describe a European buying committee, many of whom never fill in a form. For MSSPs, MQLs and deal registrations fit poorly, because providers rarely register individual end-customer deals.

MSSPmanaged security service providermaking partners sell

A provider that operates security for its customers and charges a recurring fee for the outcome, with your product as one input to its service, often invisible to the end customer. It needs multi-tenant management, role-based access per tenant, APIs, integration with its RMM and PSA tools, and monthly pricing with no or low minimums per tenant. Its growth comes from rolling the service out to its base.

mutual planmutual action plandeals

A plan shared with the buyer that lists the steps to signature, each with an owner and a date on both sides. The no-decision guide uses it as a test: if the buyer won't put dates on three steps, you have learned the deal's real status. The procurement and security review guides add supplier onboarding and the review itself as dated lines.

N

NIS2Directive (EU) 2022/2555regulated buyers

The EU directive that, through each country's national law, applies to essential and important entities in 18 sectors and requires them to take cybersecurity risk-management measures and report incidents. Its obligations apply to organisations: a product can support specific measures and cannot make a company compliant. For a vendor it shows up as a reason to buy, as a supplier review of you and as contract changes (not legal advice).

see also: Article 21 transposition KSC DORA

no decisionno-decision lossdeals

A deal that ends with the customer doing nothing. Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, working from about 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, report that 40% to 60% of deals end this way, on a base that includes early and poorly qualified deals. They separate two causes that look the same in a CRM, status quo preference and indecision, and the two need opposite treatments.

O

OPZopis przedmiotu zamówienia · tender specificationregulated buyers

The opis przedmiotu zamówienia, the technical specification of a Polish public tender. In software and security tenders it is usually a numbered list of requirements that bidders confirm line by line in a compliance table, which is a binding statement. The guide's argument is that the tender is largely decided here, months before the bids, so a vendor's work belongs before publication.

P

partner activationmaking partners sell

The step from a signed partner agreement to repeatable commercial activity. ZINFI's countable definition is the share of signed partners with at least one registered deal, referral or closed transaction within a fixed window, such as 90 days, 6 months or 12 months. Portal logins, webinars and certifications are signs of engagement and belong in a separate column.

partner enablementmaking partners sell

The activities that make a partner's people able to spot, sell, design, deploy and support your product. The guide builds it around the steps of a deal, since the first conversation and the demo or POC are where partners tend to lose, and tracks each partner from shadowing your engineer to handling standard deals alone. It is judged by registered opportunities and win rates.

partner health scoremaking partners sell

One number per partner made of visible parts: lagging results such as revenue, leading indicators such as registrations, pipeline and certifications, and relationship signals such as QBR attendance and forecast reliability. The guide's starting weights are a practitioner heuristic, with a floor in each dimension and missing inputs treated as unknown. It lets a channel team sort the portfolio and spot changes early.

partner tierspartner levelschoosing partners

Levels in a partner programme, each with requirements and the benefits that follow from them. For a vendor with tens or a few hundred partners in a country, the guide suggests three levels (registered, certified, strategic) built on capability, commitment and performance, with thresholds set from your own partners there. A tier is worth something only if it changes what partners do.

partner-influenced revenuepartner influencemaking partners sell

Revenue from deals a partner materially helped win without having found them, for example by running a POC, building an integration or giving access to a sponsor. The guide records influence as a partner linked to the deal with a role and evidence, and counts each deal once however many partners touched it. Report it next to partner-sourced revenue and never add the two.

partner-sourced revenuepartner-sourced pipelinemaking partners sell

Revenue from deals the partner found and brought to you, usually proven by a deal registration. In the 2022 State of Partner Ops and Programs survey by HubSpot, Canalys and Partnership Leaders, 81.1% of organisations used it as a partner KPI. It is easy to defend and undervalues partners that work deals they did not find, so record each deal's origin once, at creation, and lock it.

POCproof of concept · proof of valuePOCs

A time-boxed evaluation in the buyer's environment that answers whether the product does the job. A passed POC and a buying decision are two different layers, so the guide agrees to one only when the doubt can't be resolved more cheaply, a decision date exists and the buyer commits its own people. Public guidance clusters around two to eight weeks; GitLab designs its evaluations around 30 days with a check at day 15.

preliminary market consultationwstępne konsultacje rynkoweregulated buyers

The legitimate way to shape a Polish public tender before publication, regulated in Article 84 of the Polish Public Procurement Law and based on Articles 40 and 41 of Directive 2014/24/EU. A vendor can describe the need, measurable outcomes and verifiable criteria, knowing that what it shares may be passed to other bidders. Drafting specification text around your own product invites a challenge.

Q

QBRquarterly business reviewmaking partners sell

The quarterly meeting where a joint business plan lives and joint decisions are made. The vendor brings a data pack the partner could not easily produce alone: revenue against the plan, registered pipeline, renewals due, certification status and forecast reliability. The guide's 90-minute agenda ends with three to five joint actions with owners on both sides and the partner's feedback on what the vendor should do better.

R

readoutPOC readoutPOCs

The meeting at the end of a POC, which the guide treats as the decision meeting. Written results go to the champion first, the readout walks through each signed criterion with its evidence, gaps are stated before the buyer raises them, and the commercial proposal is ready. A technical win without agreement to proceed means the decision process or budget was never confirmed, and the work goes back to qualification.

S

security reviewsupplier security review · vendor risk reviewPOCs

The buyer's evaluation of you as a supplier, run by security, risk, privacy, procurement and legal while engineers test the product. Started after the readout it sits on the critical path; started with the POC it runs in parallel and the signature moves earlier. Send the standard evidence first: audit reports, a completed questionnaire, a data flow diagram, your data processing agreement and a named security contact.

service blueprintservice packagemaking partners sell

A documented, priced service package a partner can sell and deliver: scope, prerequisites, steps, deliverables, effort, roles, acceptance criteria and exclusions. Two or three per product, such as a quick start, a standard deployment and an annual health check, let a small partner sell a service it has delivered once. Recommended price ranges are allowed in the EU, while fixing a partner's resale price is a hardcore restriction.

services attach rateattach rate · services attach ratiomaking partners sell

The share of product deals in which the partner sold at least one paid service. The attach ratio is a separate measure: services revenue divided by licence revenue on the same deals. A partner can attach a service to every deal and still sell very little, so the guide tracks both, by partner type and by product.

SIG questionnaireSIG Lite · SIG Core · SIG DetailPOCs

A standard supplier security questionnaire from Shared Assessments, which lists 128 questions for SIG Lite 2025, 627 for SIG Core and 1,936 for the full SIG Detail. Sending a completed one (or a CAIQ, whichever your market uses) before the buyer's own questionnaire arrives shortens the review. Say which edition you completed, because other pages quote different counts.

SOC 2SOC 2 Type 1 · SOC 2 Type 2POCs

An audit report on a supplier's controls. Type 1 assesses whether controls are designed properly at one point in time, and Type 2 tests whether they operated over a period, which regulated buyers usually want. A report covers what its system description says and does not test the buyer's configuration, and calling yourself SOC 2 compliant when only a Type 1 exists is one of the answers the guide says cost most.

special pricingbid desk · special pricing requestchoosing partners

A price below the standard partner price, approved deal by deal, usually to meet competition. When a non-registered partner gets one on a registered opportunity, the registered partner's cost advantage disappears while its registration stays technically valid. Special pricing on a large share of deals is also one of the early signs of margin leakage in a channel.

speed to leadlead response timemeetings

How fast a person replies to an inbound demo request. In James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington's 2011 analysis for Harvard Business Review, firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than firms that waited one more hour; the study measured qualification on US data. Speed comes mostly from routing: one owner per request by country and language, with the account checked for a registered partner deal before the first reply.

SPIFsales performance incentive fundchoosing partners

A short incentive for one behaviour, such as the first sale of a new product or renewals before quarter end. The guide suggests no more than two at once, each for four to twelve weeks and paid within 30 days. A SPIF speeds up a partner that already has a customer in sight and creates no demand, and in the EU it must be tied to volume or product mix, never to a minimum resale price.

status quo preferencestatus quo biasdeals

The state in which a buyer is not convinced that changing is worth it: the problem is tolerable, the budget has other claims, the current tool is good enough. In Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna's data it accounts for 44% of no-decision losses. It responds to a higher cost of doing nothing, put in numbers from the buyer's own world.

success criteriaPOC success criteria · success planPOCs

Written statements of what a POC must show for the buyer to proceed. Good ones are few and measurable, each with a baseline, a target and an evidence source, sorted into mandatory, weighted and observed, and approved before the POC starts by the people who decide. The guide adds one sentence on what success leads to, and a buyer's refusal to sign it is information you get before spending engineering time.

T

TEITotal Economic Impactdeals

Forrester's series of vendor-commissioned ROI studies: a handful of customer interviews combined into a fictional composite organisation, with benefits and costs modelled over three years. Forrester's own disclosures tell readers to use their own estimates. The guide uses one as a checklist of benefit and cost categories, labelled as vendor-commissioned, and keeps its headline ROI out of the buyer's case.

V

VADvalue-added distributormarket entry

A distributor that adds a demand layer to logistics: presales engineers, a lab, partner training, local events and someone who reads tenders. That layer is a fixed cost paid before volume exists, funded from the distributor's margin on your line. The guide's arithmetic shows why splitting a mid-sized market between two distributors halves the budget for it.

Vertical Block Exemption RegulationRegulation (EU) 2022/720 · VBER · resale price maintenance · passive salesregulated buyers

The EU regulation that sets the limits of distribution agreements. A supplier may recommend a resale price or set a maximum, while fixing a minimum or fixed resale price is a hardcore restriction, and so is restricting passive sales to customers who approach a partner unprompted. It shapes deal registration, exclusivity, rebates and MDF conditions, and a policy built on it is a document for competition counsel.

Missing a term? The guides are grouped by the job they help with: market entry, meetings, deals, regulated buyers, POCs, choosing partners and making partners sell. Numbers used on the site, with their sources, are on numbers.