Every dealer has done this: sat through a partner kickoff call, gotten excited about a new incentive tracker or enablement portal, shared the login with two reps, and then never thought about it again. Three weeks later, nobody’s opened it. Six months later, or at renewal, someone finally asks whether it was worth the time.
This isn’t a story about a bad program. It’s the default outcome for almost every OEM initiative that rolls out with enthusiasm and quietly dies a few weeks later. Nobody talks about it much, because it’s uncomfortable on both sides: the OEM doesn’t want to admit their launch numbers don’t hold, and the dealer doesn’t want to admit they signed up for something they never used.
I spent over 25 years in the office technology channel, and the last eight running global partner programs at HP, scaling one platform from an early-stage rollout to more than 1,400 partners across more than 30 countries. One of the harder problems I ever solved wasn’t getting partners to sign up. It was keeping them engaged once the launch excitement wore off. The clearest evidence of that gap showed up in remote operations, for instance when pushing a firmware upgrade to a device without a truck roll. Dealers that treated our guidance as standard practice saw success rates climb sharply. Those that treated it as optional stayed flat. Same technology everywhere. The difference was entirely in whether a market followed the process.
Here’s what that plateau looks like from the inside
A branch manager gets access to a new tracker during a kickoff call and shares the login with two reps. Three weeks later, nobody’s opened it, because week to week, the reps are heads down in the CRM they already live in. The new portal is one more tab competing for attention that it never had a real claim to.
Or: Technicians get trained on a new remote diagnostics tool at a regional event. It works great in the training room. Back in the field, they default to the old habit, call dispatch, guess at parts – because pulling up a second app midway through a service call feels like friction, not help. Six months later, adoption is close to zero despite everyone technically completing the training.
Neither of these is a failure of will. Nobody decided not to use the tool. They just never built a reason to keep using it into how they already work.
The cost isn’t abstract. Your team already paid for that program once, in training hours and ramp time. Letting it go quiet doesn’t undo that cost, it just means you paid for it with no return – and often took a hit to tier status and rep attention along with it.
A three step gut check
The fix isn’t more training, and it isn’t a better feature set. It’s three questions asked at rollout, not six months later once the numbers have already gone flat.
First, name an owner on day one. Not “the team.” Pick someone who’s already excited about what the program can actually do, not about whoever happened to be free when the OEM rep called. Make that chosen person the resident expert with real standing to speak for the program internally. One name, accountable for whether the program gets used, not just whether the app got installed.
Second, attach the program to something people already do. Don’t ask a team to build a new habit and adopt a new login at the same time. If a program can’t plug into a routine your people already run daily, that’s the first sign it won’t survive contact with a normal week.
Third, check back at 30 and 60 days, not just at launch. If engagement is already fading by day 30, that’s the moment to fix it or kill it, not the moment to wait for the next business review to notice it died two months earlier.
None of this is complicated. It’s also almost never done, because most rollouts treat launch day as the finish line instead of the starting line.
What to do with this
Pull up the OEM program your team enrolled in most recently, or the one nobody’s opened in a few weeks. Run the three questions against it before your next renewal or QBR conversation. If it fails all three, that’s not a reason to feel behind. It’s a reason to fix it now, while it’s still cheap to fix, instead of a year from now after you’ve been paying for something that quietly became shelfware. The programs that pay off aren’t the ones with the best features. They’re the ones somebody kept alive on purpose.
Jason Ruston
Jason Ruston spent over 30 years in the office technology channel, in dealer sales and leadership before spending the last eight years building and scaling global partner programs at HP, growing one platform from an early-stage rollout to 1,400+ partners across more than 30 countries. He now advises dealers and vendors on partner program design and adoption through Jason Ruston LLC. linkedin.com/in/jason-ruston