I. The great PS pivot: An industry microcosm
In the current hyper-growth environment, the traditional Professional Services (PS) model — with vendor experts competing directly with partners for implementation margin — doesn't scale to meet customer demand. While effective for smaller projects, that model became a bottleneck for complex initiatives like enterprise Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) and Zero Trust programs that we see our public sector customers working on.
Okta’s flashpoint: This dynamic recently came to a head when a customer faced a major budget gap threatening to derail their entire identity program. They believed they needed a massive services package, but the numbers didn't add up.
Instead of trying to "sell more," we put the sale aside, revisited their needs, and quickly discovered their misunderstanding of our licensing model. By clarifying and translating their needs into the most efficient licensing structure, we helped them reduce their licensing cost by an amount far exceeding what they needed from PS engagement to save their project. We didn't sell them more; we gave them the key to their own success.
We realized focusing on selling hours didn't align with our commitment to delivering the best and fastest customer value. So we made a fundamental pivot: Our primary mission is no longer to sell our own PS, but to become a services multiplier — a force whose primary goal is to uplift, enable, and co-deliver alongside our partners.
This strategic shift transforms my role from a Services Sales Director into a Chief Partnership Architect, demanding a new set of skills that prioritize enablement over engagement. This isn't a concession; it's the only way to scale customer success faster than the market demands and ensure our partners are the primary drivers of that success.
II. The five human skills of a multiplier
The "services multiplier" model fundamentally changes the job description, shifting the focus from transactional selling to strategic enablement. In that context, these five human skills are now non-negotiable for anyone looking to scale a successful partner ecosystem.
Translator (Technical storytelling)
In the identity space, technical complexity is a given. You're dealing with vast architectures, nuanced compliance standards (like NIST 800-53, CMMC, or FICAM), and acronyms that mean the difference between a secure environment and a major vulnerability. The translator's job is to take this complexity and simplify it into a clear, consumable narrative for two distinct audiences.
First, for the customer, the story must connect the technical deployment (the what) directly to their business outcomes (the why). Second, and more importantly in this partner-first model, this translation must clearly link the technical requirements to the partner’s business strategy and margin goals.
I rely heavily on my technical background here (from my time at PANW, AWS, and others). Technical credibility is essential to earning the trust needed to co-design a profitable solution path with partners. The better we translate, the easier it is for our partners to build a profitable, repeatable practice around our solutions.
Empath (Understanding partner economics)
The empath knows that a successful partnership is built on the intersection of two critical priorities: partner profitability and Okta’s core mission. The goal is to align the customer’s financial success with the velocity of customer value.
For Okta, the primary objective is to minimize the latency between a customer’s excitement for our product’s potential and their satisfaction with its successfully implemented solution. For our partners, the objective is high utilization and profitable projects. An empath operates in the middle, listening to the partner’s economic constraints (cash flow, utilization targets, labor arbitrage) and strategically guiding them toward the highest-margin, most repeatable work (e.g., custom integrations, advisory work).
We insert Okta’s PS offerings only to fill temporary gaps or address highly specialized, non-scalable needs. This balanced understanding ensures our strategy complements their business while accelerating the customer's time-to-value, building loyalty because the partner knows we’re invested in their bottom line and the ultimate success of the joint customer.
Strategist (Standardizing repeatable value)
The greatest enemy of profitability — for vendor and partner — is a custom, one-off project. Okta’s PS team walks into every customer environment as industry experts with a clear vision and opinion on how best to execute their identity roadmap.
The strategist's primary role is to share that intellectual capital with our partners, either through direct uplift and training or delivery assurance and co-delivery. This means transforming what was once a bespoke, multi-week engagement into a predictable, two-day workshop or a defined jumpstart package. It also involves building out and maintaining standardized, documented patterns and methodologies for delivering common, complex identity outcomes.
When a partner architect can approach a customer with an official, standardized Okta deployment methodology, it de-risks the project, reduces scope creep, and drastically improves the partner's gross margin. A strategist doesn’t sell hours; they sell predictable outcomes derived from repeatable processes.
Coach (Scaling expertise)
A services multiplier doesn't just sell a partner a solution; they transfer the knowledge and confidence required for the partner to own the next one. The coach focuses relentlessly on achieving partner self-sufficiency across delivery and commercial engagement.
- Delivery coaching: Driven by our technical teams, delivery coaching involves co-delivery, with an Okta expert working side-by-side with a partner's consultant on an early engagement, to provide on-the-job training and "delivery assurance." The goal: to graduate partners from being reliant on Okta's guidance to fully independent, highly profitable delivery engines for our joint customers.
- Sales coaching: Driven by our Services Account Executives, former sales professionals who are coaching partners on how to effectively scope, position, and sell standardized Okta service offerings. They provide the necessary training and mentorship for partners to confidently own the entire service opportunity lifecycle.
The ultimate goal for a coach is to instill the technical mastery and sales confidence that ensure the partner's long-term profitability and success.
Broker (Navigating internal channels)
For a partner-first strategy to work, the vendor must be a frictionless machine. However, many vendor PS organizations operate with archaic rules, commission structures that penalize partnership, and complex internal processes that make co-selling a nightmare. A broker’s role is to clear the organizational clutter.
They act as the partner’s internal advocate, ensuring fair play and removing administrative obstacles, like helping ensure that internal sales teams are credited and compensated when a partner leads a services deal or simplifying the internal approval and scoping processes.
Brokers effectively turn the complex labyrinth of a large enterprise into a smooth, single lane for partners. By minimizing this internal friction, we prove that we’re partner first by removing the commercial risk and administrative burden.
III. Conclusion: The services multiplier effect
Shifting to a partner-first PS model is not a defensive retreat; it’s a strategic choice to achieve unprecedented scale and market impact. Our technical foundation, the strength of the Okta platform, gets us in the door. But it’s our human skills — our willingness to listen, translate, enable, and empower — that ultimately make this new partnership model scalable and effective.
True services multipliers know that empowering partners to own and profit from delivery accelerates value realization for the customer, strengthens the entire ecosystem, and secures Okta's place as a leader in identity innovation. We traded the selling stick for the empowerment handshake, and the entire market is better for it.
We'd love to hear your thoughts: If you're a customer, what does a successful vendor-partner team look like to you when rolling out a strategic project like Zero Trust? Contact Okta’s Professional Services team.
