Channel Sales Manager

POSITION SUMMARY

As Senior Channel Manager, you will own CIQ’s channel-led revenue as an individual contributor, reporting directly to the company’s sales leadership. You will build and run CIQ’s partner motion across three fronts: recruiting new channel partners, developing and enabling existing partners, and managing distributor relationships. Every partner activity ties back to sourced and influenced revenue. Additional responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Identify, qualify, and recruit new channel partners (resellers, VARs, SIs, MSPs) whose customer base and technical focus align with Rocky Linux, RLC, and the broader CIQ portfolio; build the recruitment pipeline, run outreach, and close partner agreements directly.
• Develop existing partners into producing partners through seller and SE enablement, joint business planning, co-marketing and demand-generation coordination, and accountability to mutually agreed targets; diagnose why partners are not selling and fix it.
• Own distributor relationships and economics, including transactional flow, margin, and incentive structures, and using distributor reach to extend partner recruitment without CIQ carrying all the overhead.
• Define and run the program mechanics: partner tiers, deal registration, the margin model, enablement, and the metrics that govern them.
• Work cross-functionally with direct sales (to manage channel conflict and run co-sell), marketing (partner demand generation), and product (to feed partner and market signal back).
• Carry and forecast a channel-sourced and influenced pipeline contribution.

NEEDED TO SUCCEED

Successful candidates will have:

• A genuine self-starter mindset, comfortable operating with ambiguity, and a near-blank slate.
• Strong commercial instincts, with the ability to negotiate partner economics and defend margin.
• Credibility with both partner executives and partner field reps.
• The discipline to run their book on numbers, not relationships alone.
• A hands-on operator’s approach, doing the work directly (outreach, partner conversations, enablement sessions, negotiations) rather than delegating it.
• A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving to be better attitude.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant work experience.
• 8+ years of experience in channel, partner, or alliances sales, ideally in infrastructure, open source, or enterprise software.
• A track record of personally building partner relationships that produced real revenue (not solely managing a team that did).
• Experience standing up or materially growing partner program mechanics: tiering, deal registration, margin models, and enablement.