Make your accounting channel land fast and last long.
Build it, tune it, or sharpen it. I work the whole job. Who to sell to, how they buy, what makes it worth an accountant's while to put you in front of their clients, and what makes them actually switch on. Fifteen years doing exactly this at Xero, Soldo and Satago.
Start with the free Diagnostic, or a £500 Channel Review. Either way you get answers in days, not quarters.
The gap costs more than you think.
Channel revenue leaks at every stage, and most of the leaks are invisible from the inside. Trials that never convert. Onboarding that stalls. Partners who use the easy features and never touch the valuable ones. Firms that go quiet at every rung of the programme, for a different reason each time.
On their own each one looks like a rounding error. Together they are the difference between a channel that pays for itself and one that does not, and working out which of them is actually costing you takes an experienced eye from outside the building.
All this adds up to slow adoption, throttled growth and churn you can see coming.
Most vendors are surprised by the size of it. Work out yours.
Two halves of the same job.
Channel build and GTM
Building a channel from nothing, or tuning one that is already running. Ideal customer, positioning, structure, sales motions and the enablement to win the business. The part most vendors skip is making the numbers work for the accountant too, because a firm that cannot see the value in it for them will never sell you on.
Activation and behaviour design
Winning the deal is half the job. I design the onboarding architecture, behaviour change and account management that get partners actually using the product. The half most vendors miss, and the one that decides whether the revenue is still there next year.
Find out, then fix it.
Every engagement starts by finding out what is actually going wrong, and what fixing it is worth. Pick the point that sounds like where you are.
“I'm just exploring - I'm not sure yet”
The free Channel Diagnostic shows you where your channel is leaking. Ten questions, 3.5 minutes, no prep needed.
Take the free Diagnostic →What each one involves, and what it costs.
Find out
Three depths. The Diagnostic is free and asks nothing of you. The full £500 Channel Review fee comes off a Channel Audit that starts within 6 weeks. Enterprise is priced to the scope.
- Channel Diagnostic - free, 3.5 minutes
- Channel Review - £500 + VAT
- Channel Audit - from £7,500 + VAT
- Channel Audit (Enterprise) - from £15,000 + VAT
Fix it
Then the work itself. Anything from a short one-off project through to a fractional Head of Accounting Partnerships sitting inside your team. Some of what that covers:
- Sales enablement, embedded with your team
- Onboarding and behaviour design
- Training and rep coaching
- Direct intervention with key accounts
- Fractional Head of Accounting Partnerships
Everything a partner channel might need is in the map below, delivered by Nomad and its partners.
Not sure which one is yours?
Tell me where the channel is stuck and I will point you at the right rung. Fifteen minutes is usually enough.
Book a Discovery CallEverything you could need to enhance your channel.
There are a multitude of tools, tactics and levers to influence your channel. The question is - what will move the needle for you?
- Value PropositionWhat you are selling, to whom, and at what price. Everything downstream depends on those three answers.
- Channel StrategyWhat the channel is for, what it is expected to return, and what you are prepared to spend to get there.
- Partner EnablementWhat you put in the hands of a partner firm so they can get on with it without you.
- Partner activationGetting a signed firm genuinely live and using it, first time, before the enthusiasm runs out.
- ICP definitionThe ideal customer profile. Which firms you should actually be selling to, and which ones are costing you money.
- Partner SegmentationWhich firms get white glove, which get self-serve, and the honest reason why.
- IC3 ModelIdentify, Contact, Convince, Convert. Onboarding is done when a firm can do all four without you. Miss a leg and they do not stall, they never start.
- Partner onboarding architectureThe path from signed to switched on, designed rather than hoped for.
- Behaviour ChangeMaking the new way easier than the old way. The bit that runs on hardware from 100,000 years ago.
- Sales EnablementEverything that helps your team have a better conversation than the one they had last week.
- Training and EducationBuilding the ability before you ask for the result.
- Fractional Head of Accounting PartnershipsSenior channel leadership without the headcount, the recruiter or the ramp. The seat that runs everything else on here.
There are 125 in all.
Active Advocate
A firm that uses the product properly, recommends it without being asked, and brings its clients with it. Everything else on here exists to produce one of these.
Fractional Head of Accounting Partnerships
Senior channel leadership without the headcount, the recruiter or the ramp. The seat that runs everything else on here.
Commercial
Whether the deal works. For you, for the firm, and at more than a handful of partners.
- Value Proposition - What you are selling, to whom, and at what price. Everything downstream depends on those three answers.
- Pricing - What you charge, how it is packaged, what you discount and what you never discount. Usually decided once and never revisited.
- ICP definition - The ideal customer profile. Which firms you should actually be selling to, and which ones are costing you money.
- Channel Marketing Strategy - Who you are talking to, what you are saying and where, so the channel team is not building its own pipeline from a standing start.
- Outbound - Going and finding firms rather than waiting for them. Lists, sequences and the discipline to keep running them.
- Inbound - Firms arriving because something you published answered a question they already had.
- Social Media - Showing up where accountants are, often enough that your name is familiar before a rep ever calls.
- Events & Expos - Accountex, roadshows, the stand and everything around it. Expensive, and mostly wasted without a plan for the follow-up.
- Positioning - How the product is framed to a firm that has heard it all before.
- Use Cases - The specific situations where this is obviously the right answer, written so a firm recognises itself.
- Digital asset development - Guides, tools and templates that scale attention you cannot give in person.
- Copywriting - The words on the page, the email and the deck, written by someone who does it for a living.
- Video - The format a busy firm will actually give you two minutes for.
- Testimonials - Partner firms saying it in their own words, which lands harder than anything you say about yourself.
- Explainers - Short films that answer the question a rep gets asked on every single call.
- Tutorials - How to do the thing, on demand, at the moment someone is stuck.
- Event Coverage - Filming the conference, roadshow or webinar, and cutting it into assets that keep working afterwards.
- Promo Assets - The cutdowns and teasers that carry an announcement further than an email does.
- Podcasts - A regular show that reaches accountants every week without asking them for a meeting.
- Channel Strategy - What the channel is for, what it is expected to return, and what you are prepared to spend to get there.
- Partner Segmentation - Which firms get white glove, which get self-serve, and the honest reason why.
- GTM Priorities - What gets the attention this quarter and what waits, so effort is not spread thinly over everything at once.
- Competitive analysis - Where you sit against the alternatives a firm is weighing up, and the answers your reps need when it comes up on a call.
- Scalability of the model - Whether the programme still works at ten times the partners, or only works because certain people keep doing favours.
- Channel Structure - How the programme is tiered, and what each tier actually earns a firm.
- Incentives + benefits - What a firm gets for being in the programme, and whether any of it is worth changing behaviour for.
- Referral Method - How a firm gets paid or credited for sending you business, and whether that is ever enough to make them bother.
- AM Quarterly Business Reviews - The quarterly conversation with a partner. A report if you let it be one, a decision if you run it properly.
- Territory planning - Who each rep owns and why, so effort lands where the revenue is.
- Practice Strategy - Where the firm itself is trying to get to. Sell against that and you are on their agenda rather than yours.
- Stakeholder / Influence Mapping - Who actually decides inside a practice, who blocks, and who nobody thought to ask.
- Practice Strategy - Where the firm itself is trying to get to. Sell against that and you are on their agenda rather than yours.
- Territory planning - Who each rep owns and why, so effort lands where the revenue is.
Partner Experience
What it is actually like to be a partner firm of yours, from first contact through to being properly up and running.
- Partner communications - What partners hear from you, how often, and whether any of it is worth opening.
- Nurture Journeys - The sequence that keeps a firm moving when nobody is chasing them. Most channels have a welcome email and then silence.
- Channel Design - The mechanics. Partner journey, commercials, ownership, and who does what at each step.
- SDR / AM / CSM Handover - The moment a firm gets passed from one of your people to the next. Where the relationship most often drops.
- Partner Enablement - What you put in the hands of a partner firm so they can get on with it without you.
- IC3 Model - Identify, Contact, Convince, Convert. Onboarding is done when a firm can do all four without you. Miss a leg and they do not stall, they never start.
- Partner Hub & Resources - One place a firm can find everything, instead of hunting back through six emails and a shared drive.
- Co-branded assets - Video, guides and campaigns the partner firm puts its own logo on and sends to its clients. Your message, their voice.
- Workflow Mapping - How the practice actually works today, written down. You cannot change a process nobody has drawn.
- Sales Enablement - Everything that helps your team have a better conversation than the one they had last week.
- Dedicated Support - Someone a partner can actually reach, who knows their name and their setup.
- Accountant Knowledge base - The answers a firm can find at 9pm without waiting for your support queue.
- Specialist Support - The hard questions a generalist desk cannot take. Tax, migration and integrations, the ones that stall a rollout.
- Partner Community - Somewhere partners talk to each other. The cheapest support you will ever run, and the least controllable.
- Events - Getting partners in a room. The relationships built there do more than a year of emails.
- Workshops - Working sessions rather than presentations. People leave having done something rather than having watched something.
- Partner Success - Whoever is responsible for a firm still being here in two years.
- Partner Retention - Why firms leave, and what it costs you to notice a year late.
- Accountant-specific Product needs - The things a practice needs that your roadmap was not written for. Bulk actions, client switching, the unglamorous list.
- Product Feedback Capture - A route from a complaint to your roadmap that does not depend on one account manager remembering.
- Education design - Learning built for how a busy practice actually works, and built to change what people do.
- Product Education - Teaching the product. What it does, how to drive it, and what to do when it does something unexpected.
- Certification - A qualification a firm can put on its website. Half the value is the badge, not the learning.
- Advisor Directory - The public list of certified firms. It is the reward that makes certification worth finishing.
- Role Based Education - Different training for the partner, the manager and the junior. They need different things and only one of them has time.
- Certification - A qualification a firm can put on its website. Half the value is the badge, not the learning.
- Workflow Education - Teaching the new way of working, not the software. The bit almost every vendor skips.
- Product Education - Teaching the product. What it does, how to drive it, and what to do when it does something unexpected.
- Partner activation - Getting a signed firm genuinely live and using it, first time, before the enthusiasm runs out.
- Champion Development - Finding the one person inside a firm who will carry it, and giving them what they need to win the argument internally.
- Champion Enablement - Arming the person carrying it internally. They are making your argument in a room you will never be in.
- Sales Resources - What a champion needs to sell it internally. Numbers, a one-pager and an answer to the partner who says no.
- Selection - Picking the right champion. The keenest person in the room is not always the one with the influence.
- Champion Enablement - Arming the person carrying it internally. They are making your argument in a room you will never be in.
- Partner onboarding architecture - The path from signed to switched on, designed rather than hoped for.
- Time to value - How long before a firm sees something real. The single number most predictive of whether they stay.
- Change Management - Running the change properly rather than announcing it and hoping.
- Behaviour Change - Making the new way easier than the old way. The bit that runs on hardware from 100,000 years ago.
- Change programmes inside firms - Going into a partner firm and running the change with them, on your behalf, because they will not run it themselves.
- Line Manager Coaching - Coaching the person between the plan and the people doing the work. Change dies at this level more than any other.
- Leadership Change Coaching - Getting the partners and directors to behave differently in public, because nobody below them will if they do not.
- Change programmes inside firms - Going into a partner firm and running the change with them, on your behalf, because they will not run it themselves.
- Behaviour Change - Making the new way easier than the old way. The bit that runs on hardware from 100,000 years ago.
- Ah-Ha moment - The point where a firm stops being sold to and starts getting it. Find yours and you can design everything backwards from it.
- Champion Development - Finding the one person inside a firm who will carry it, and giving them what they need to win the argument internally.
Client Experience
What the clients of that firm get out of it, which is the real reason a partner recommends anything.
- Client Value Proposition - What the firm tells its own clients this is for, in language a client cares about.
- Client comms and templates - The emails, letters and talking points a firm sends its clients, so the message does not get rewritten badly by every partner.
- Adoption - Whether the clients of that firm end up using it, which is the only version of success that pays twice.
- Training - Teaching the clients of that firm, or giving the firm what it needs to teach them.
- Product Training - How to use it. The obvious half.
- Workflow training - How the bookkeeping at the client end actually changes. The half that gets skipped.
- Client Enablement - What the firm hands its clients. Written once by you, used a hundred times by them.
- Practice tutorials - Short how-tos a firm can send a client instead of booking a screen share.
- Client activation - The path a client travels from being told about it to actually using it. Your partner activation problem, one level down.
- Client onboarding architecture - How the firm brings its own clients onto it. The second onboarding, and the one almost nobody designs.
- Data Migration - Moving an existing client base across without losing people in the process, which is where most firms stall.
Internal Operations and Structure
Your own house. The team, the targets, the data and the plumbing behind all of it.
- People Experience - What it is like to work in your channel team. It shows up in the partner experience whether you manage it or not.
- Team Structure - Who does what, and where one role hands to the next.
- Team Targets - What the team is measured on, which is what the team will do.
- Individual Targets - The same question one level down, where it gets personal and the behaviour actually changes.
- Team Targets - What the team is measured on, which is what the team will do.
- Training and Education - Building the ability before you ask for the result.
- Leadership Training - Building the managers who run the channel, not just the reps who work in it.
- Sales Training - How to sell this, to these people. Generic sales training does not survive contact with an accountant.
- IVOBA Model - Important, Value, Opportunity, Blockers, Actions. The discovery framework.
- DiSC Training - Reading the person across the table and adjusting how you talk to them.
- Accountant Awareness - How firms think, how they buy, how they bill, and what makes them say no. The single biggest gap in most channel teams.
- Rep Coaching - One to one, on live deals, in the flow of the work.
- Call reviews - Listening to real calls and fixing what is going wrong inside them.
- Personal Branding - Accountants buy from people, not logos. Getting your team credible in their own right, so firms come to them.
- LinkedIn - Where accountants actually are, and what makes a channel team worth following rather than worth muting.
- Leadership Coaching - Coaching the coaches, so it holds after everyone external has left.
- Recruitment - Hiring the right channel person rather than the available one.
- SDR/AM/CSM Job spec - What you are actually asking for, written before you meet anyone. Most channel job specs describe a salesperson and then hire disappointment.
- SDR Support - Whether a new rep has anything to work with on day one, or spends three months building their own.
- SDR/AM/CSM Job spec - What you are actually asking for, written before you meet anyone. Most channel job specs describe a salesperson and then hire disappointment.
- Succession Planning - What happens when the person who knows every partner leaves.
- eNPS - Whether your own team would recommend working here. It leaks into every partner conversation.
- Team Structure - Who does what, and where one role hands to the next.
- KPI Tracking - The numbers you run the channel on, and whether anyone acts on them.
- Target setting - What good looks like, set before the quarter rather than justified after it.
- CRM setup - The system your team either lives in or works around. There is no third option.
- Forecasting - What is going to close and when. The number your board sees, and the one your reps privately disagree with.
- Feedback loops - Real data coming back, and something changing because of it.
- Data Management - Getting partner data into a shape you can ask questions of.
- Data Tracking - Measuring what firms actually do, rather than what they signed up for.
- Data Interpretation - Working out what the numbers mean. The step between a dashboard and a decision.
- Data quality and hygiene - Fixing the duplicate, stale and half-filled records every other number is built on.
- Activation instrumentation - Measuring how far a firm has genuinely got, rather than whether it signed.
- Continuous optimisation - Feedback loops, real data, and acting on what it tells you.
- Data Management - Getting partner data into a shape you can ask questions of.
- Process Automation - Taking the manual steps out, so the process survives a busy month.
Wider Business Strategy
The decisions above the channel that the channel still has to live with.
- Funding - The runway question, and what it does to how patient the channel is allowed to be.
- Direct Sales - Your own sales team, and how it coexists with a partner base chasing the same firms.
- Channel Conflict - What happens when your direct team and your partners chase the same firm.
- Strategic Partnerships - The integrations, alliances and platform relationships that decide who you can reach.
- Product Market Fit - Whether the thing works for the people you are selling it to. Everything else on this sphere assumes it does.
What people say.
Feedback from people who have worked with me directly.
“Not many people can sit in a room with accountants and immediately earn their trust. Leigh can. I carried his approach with me to Pleo, where it underpinned how we built a network of over a thousand partner firms. If you're a software vendor trying to get it right in the UK accountancy market, Leigh is who you need.”
“He came in with a clear-eyed view of the gap we had between firms connecting their accounts and actually doing something meaningful with their clients. He identified three specific areas worth acting on. His thinking directly shaped how we started rethinking our pricing model into three clearer tiers.”
“We've already got a strong onboarding process, but it's critical that we continue to scale. Having gone through this process with Nomad, I feel much more confident that our team, our processes and our structure are set up in the best way to help us do that.”
“Leigh has a real grasp on this... it really gets you thinking about onboarding - not just 'how do we get clients to stay' but more 'how can we create an experience that builds credibility, value for the client and builds momentum right from the start.'”
“What stood out most was his ability to coach rather than simply manage. Leigh helped me unlock how to serve customers effectively and developed my confidence in customer conversations. Practical guidance that really helped me grow.”
“What really stood out was his ability to make complex ideas practical and easy to apply. The session was delivered several years ago, yet I still find myself regularly drawing on the frameworks and tools he shared.”
“He has the benefit of training as an accountant so speaks the language, but with the additional knowledge of change management. I would recommend Leigh to support any firm grappling with change.”
Questions, answered.
What is partner activation for accounting software?
Partner activation is the work of getting accounting firms that have signed up as partners from keen at sign-up to actually using and recommending your product to their clients. It is distinct from recruitment - signing partners is easy; getting them live and active is where most channel revenue is won or lost.
Why do signed partners go quiet after onboarding?
Because signing up is a decision and rolling the software out to clients is a behaviour change, and the second does not follow automatically. Firms get busy, onboarding stalls, and your product slips down the priority list. It is rarely a product problem - it is a people and change problem, and it needs designing for, not hoping for.
What does a go-to-market consultant for accounting tech do?
For an accounting tech vendor, I build and fix the partner channel end to end - who to target, positioning, sales motion and the enablement to win the business, plus the onboarding and behaviour design that get the product actually used. I have done exactly this inside Xero, Soldo and Satago.
Do I need a channel already, or can you start one?
Either. Most of the work is on channels that already exist and are not performing - the tuning, the refining and the fixing. Where there is no channel yet, I build one. The diagnosis is the same in both cases: find out where the value is leaking before deciding what to do about it.
How do you measure accounting software adoption in a partner channel?
By tracking how far signed partners get down the path from onboarded, to actively using the product, to rolling it out across their client base and recommending it - not just how many partners you have recruited. The gap between sign-ups and active, recommending partners is usually where the lost revenue sits.
We sell directly to accounting firms, not through partners. Can you still help?
Yes. Whether you sell through accountants as partners or directly to firms as your customers, it is still a channel into practices, and the same wedge applies: understanding how accountants think and buy, and bringing your commercial reality to it. The activation gap shows up in both motions.
Ready to accelerate your accounting channel?
Whether you are diagnosing a stalled partner base or sharpening one that already performs, it starts with understanding what is actually happening.
Book a Discovery CallFree, thirty minutes. Opens my calendar in a new tab.