By Remco Livain in Fractional Executive — 18 Jul 2026

Your distributors learn from each other. They should be learning with each other.

Distributor networks over-invest in meet-ups and QBRs and under-invest in the one thing that transfers between markets: playbooks. The difference between learning from each other and learning with each other.

In the first post in this series I argued that most distributor networks stall in an ungoverned gap: nobody ever agreed who owns what. Say you’ve fixed that. The next question is how the markets actually get better — together. And here most networks reach for the same instrument: more meetings.

The annual conference. The quarterly business review. The regional alignment call. They feel like progress. Everyone flies home with a notebook full of other people’s highlights, and then changes almost nothing.

The comfortable illusion of the alignment call

Meet-ups are genuinely useful. I’ve argued before that showing up in person carries disproportionate weight in this kind of work. But a meeting transfers stories, not methods.

A partner in Italy describes a campaign that worked. Everyone nods and takes a photo of the slide. Nobody in Spain can actually run it on Monday, because what they heard was the outcome, not the recipe. The knowledge stayed in the room it was spoken in.

Learning from, versus learning with

There’s a real difference between learning from one another and learning with one another. Learning from is passive: you hear what someone did and file it away. Learning with is structural: one market writes down how it did the thing, in enough detail that another market can pick it up, run it, improve it, and hand it back better than they got it.

A meet-up tells you what worked in another market. A playbook lets you run it in yours.

What a real playbook actually contains

A playbook is not a slide of KPIs. It’s the operating detail: the offer, the sequence, the objections that came up and the answers that landed, the channel, the rough budget band, and the things not worth bothering with. The test is simple. Could a competent partner who wasn’t in the room run this next quarter from the document alone? If not, it’s a highlight, not a playbook.

Why headquarters can’t just write them

The instinct at HQ is to produce the playbooks centrally — a polished enablement kit, pushed out to everyone at once. It rarely lands, for the same reason generic marketing rarely lands: the people closest to a market know things the centre doesn’t. Channel practitioners will tell you the commonest enablement mistake is producing material designed to help the vendor, not the partner — and then wondering why it goes unopened.

McKinsey’s work on distributor relationships makes the same point from the other side: the manufacturers that get the most from their channel treat support as ongoing capability-building with partners, not a one-off drop of collateral. The best plays are authored by the markets that ran them. Headquarters’ job is to curate the library, not to write every book in it.

Getting distributors to write it down

This is the hard part, because distributors are busy and, understandably, a little proprietary about their edge. So you make it cheap and make it pay. Cheap: a short template, five prompts, a standing thirty-minute slot each quarter — not a report-writing project. Pay: recognition in front of peers, first access to the next winning play, and sometimes a real incentive to be the one who shared it.

That’s where headquarters earns its keep in this model — not by dictating the plays, but by running the exchange that lets them travel.

Keep the meet-ups. Change what you leave with.

None of this replaces getting people in a room. It’s what makes the room worth the flights. The relationships, the trust, the off-the-record aside in the corridor — those are real, and they’re where the willingness to share gets built in the first place.

In the next post I’ll get into what to actually do with a stack of playbooks: how a network can run ten experiments in parallel and compound the learning market by market, instead of rolling out one central plan and hoping.

Stop swapping highlights. Start swapping recipes.

Sources & further reading

External
McKinsey — Creating mutually beneficial partnerships with distributors
Unifyr — Channel enablement best practices