Partner Channel Conflict Rules

Write the rules that decide who owns a contested deal when direct sales and channel partners, or two partners, claim the same account, and the governance that enforces them.

The deliverable is a rules-of-engagement (RoE) artifact plus its adjudication machinery:

• Structural boundaries.
• A registration-based claim policy.
• An escalation ladder with a named adjudicator.
• A compensation-neutrality decision.
• A governance cadence.

Diagnosis anchors on two frameworks: the vertical / horizontal / multichannel conflict typology (Stern & El-Ansary, Marketing Channels, 1977; current edition Palmatier, Sivadas, Stern & El-Ansary, Marketing Channel Strategy: An Omni-Channel Approach, 9th ed., 2019), and the latent → perceived → felt → manifest stage progression. Resolution gets harder at each later stage, which is the whole argument for writing rules before the first manifest dispute. Forrester's Mitigating Channel Conflict: Rules Of Engagement is the on-point analyst artifact for the deliverable's shape.

Boundaries, said out loud:

• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@partner-ecosystem detects and measures conflict zones (account overlap, coverage gaps) and hands off here. This skill starts where detection stops.
• mbfinotti/partnerships-skills@co-selling-strategy owns how direct and partners collaborate on shared deals. Deal registration appears here only as a conflict-prevention and claim-adjudication instrument: the protection window, the tie-break, the rejection grounds, and what happens when two parties claim the same deal.