Empty Summit at Channel Partners 2026
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[00:00:00] Picture this Robert Irvine.

Remember the guy from Restaurant Impossible? Well, he's headlining a keynote at the biggest channel event of the year, and I'm looking around the room sitting there, and it's half full. Maybe if I'm being generous. And this isn't some side ballroom breakout. This is Channel Partners 2026, the Venetian.

Las Vegas, the flagship event that has marketed itself as the gathering for the entire technology channel with a food network celebrity chef holding the main stage, and I'm sitting there staring at empty chairs. So here's the question. I left Vegas naturally asking if this is the most important gathering the channel has seen in a decade.

Why did it feel like everyone was somewhere else?



So I just got back from Channel Partners 2026, and I wanna talk to you today about what I saw. What I heard, and more [00:01:00] importantly, what I think it means for the channel going forward. Because if you're a technology advisor or a vendor trying to win advisors, or maybe even a PDM trying to figure out where to put your time and your dollars going into the next year, this episode of CX without the BS should be incredibly relevant to you because Channel Partners has been.

The event for decades. Informa has been running these events for well over 25 years, and this is supposed to be where the whole industry shows up. You have your agents, your MSPs, the VARs, TSDs, integrators, vendors, all in one place. And for a long time that's exactly what it was. But I noticed it and everybody else I spoke to seemed to notice it, that something shifted this year and the shift wasn't subtle.

The attendance, even just from last year felt light. The energy felt flat. The expo floor felt smaller. And when I talked to [00:02:00] TAs and PDMs and vendors across every corner of the show, I kept hearing the same thing. The value isn't on the show floor anymore. So today we're gonna dig into that because I wanna understand why the old guard approach to channel events.

Is cracking and where advisors are actually putting their time, and what vendors better wake up to if they want to stay relevant.

Because this isn't just about one conference feeling off. This is a entire shift that's happening in the channel right now.



So April 13th through the 16th, the Venetian Las Vegas and the GM of channel events at Informa called 2026, the most important gathering the channel has seen in a decade. That was the pitch, and to be clear. There was still plenty of stuff happening. More than 350 sponsors and exhibitors, nearly 8,000 channel professionals on paper.

The AI symposium, the new CEO track, [00:03:00] the MSP summit co-located, and on the surface it should have been massive, but I was there and I walked those aisles and I sat in those sessions and. Something was off that Robert Irvine, uh, keynote speech I mentioned. It was half full. And by the way, he was great, right?

He talked about leading under pressure, solving problems, getting real about operations, all stuff that advisors and vendors should have been eating up. But the room wasn't there and that wasn't a one-off. I saw it across the expo floor too. Booths that used to have lines had a trickle. Vendors who used to do massive takeover parties scaled back, and the hallways between sessions weren't buzzing like they used to.

Like you could feel it and I wasn't alone. Every conversation I had advisors, vendors, PDMs from the TSDs, the same story was coming back. Yeah. Or here. But honestly, the real value is what's happening off campus.

The private [00:04:00] dinners, the cabana suites, the closed door one-on-ones. That's where the deals were getting talked about, and that's where the strategy sessions were happening. Not on the show floor, not in the keynotes off campus.

And this is where things get quite interesting because what I'm learning is that this isn't a one-time thing. This is actually part of a pattern. And this pattern tells you everything you need to know about where the channel is headed.



So here's where I'm gonna call out the bs, the Old Guard model of throw a giant booth at the biggest show and the advisors will come, is broken. And the vendors who keep pretending it isn't are the same vendors who turn around and tell their partners that they can't afford to do lead gen. And, and think about that because you've got vendors who will drop literally six figures, easily, six figures on a booth, on swag, on a giveaway car, on a party at Tao.

And then when an advisor calls their PDM and says, Hey, can you [00:05:00] help me run an outbound campaign? Could, could you go fund a webinar? Can, can you send me a lead list? Or even just some warm leads? The answer is, sorry. No, no. We, we don't have the budget for that. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like this? This is the one disconnect.

I can't stop thinking about this Show's own sponsor prospectus pitches the expo,

As the best ROI event of the year. And that's what vendors are told. That's the pitch. But then when you look at the actual economics, I mean a 20 by 20 exhibit space at a major trade show runs anywhere from 15 to 20 grand just for the floor space.

And that's before the booth design, before shipping, staff travel, hotel swag, food, like a real presence at channel partners with any meaningful footprint. You're at the very minimum, six figures and that, and that's starting out. But for the [00:06:00] big sponsors, the, the guys who had those ginormous booths in the middle, I mean, we're talking multi, multi six figures, if not borderline.

Seven and 94% of marketers admit that their own company fails to convert event leads into active opportunities. 94%. Only 6% of exhibitors are actually confident that they can convert the leads they capture at a trade show. So let me get this straight. Vendors will spend a quarter million dollars to rent a floor space, but they can't spend five grand to actually enable a top advisor with bait tools and real pipeline support.

Make it make sense.

All right, so let's go into the evidence, because this is not just me being cranky after jet lag from coming back to the East Coast from [00:07:00] Vegas. Um, no. What I saw at Vegas was, frankly, it, it's been happening behind the scenes, but. This was the manifestation of a seismic structural shift. Trade shows, they still eat up about 40% of B2B marketing budgets.

That's a massive line item and, and that's where the marketing money mostly goes, but the returns are not what they used to be. Only 14% of Fortune 500 companies actually see a five to one ROI on their trade show spend. Everybody else. Well, they're spending the money, they're showing up. They're smiling for booth photos, but the math doesn't.

Major shows like CES are still running 37% below their 2019 attendance numbers, and that's CES, the biggest tech show in the world. So the overall pattern in B2B events is real. People are not showing up the way they used to. [00:08:00] The ROI is softer and the smart money is asking harder questions, and this is where it gets really telling because while Channel Partners is struggling to fill that Robert Irvine keynote, the TSD events are absolutely crushing it.

Tellis just ran their largest partner summit ever in 2025, more than 1800 attendees in Anaheim, three days of advisors, suppliers, and thought leaders. Richard Murray Tellis's Chief Commercial Officer, said the energy this year was unlike anything they've seen before. And planning is already underway for 2026 in Dallas, August 11th through the 13th.

Avant ran Special Forces Summits back in September of 25 and Avant pulls around 2000 Trusted advisor partners for their annual conference app Directs Thrive, brings in around a thousand leaders from their ecosystem. So the TSDs are not struggling. The partners are showing up, the energy is there and the education is there, but they're [00:09:00] just not showing up for it in Vegas in April anymore.

Why? Well, because the value exchange is totally different. When you go to A TSD summit, you're going to your TSD, the one you actually do business with, the people who have your commission in their portal, the engineers who support your deals, the channel managers who know your name. Uh, it's not shopping anymore.

This is all strategic. And meanwhile, channel partners is shopping and shopping in the AI age is something we can do from our phones.



All right, so let's go back to the half empty Robert Irvine keynote, and now you have a bigger picture, right? So that room being half empty totally makes sense. And see the advisors who used to fly out to Vegas every spring, they did it because there was no other game in town. If you wanted eye level access to 300 plus vendors, keynote speakers, and your TSD partners all in one place, channel partners was [00:10:00] it.

But that's not true anymore. Your TSD has its own summit now, and that summit has real training, real breakouts, real one-on-one time with the people that you actually transact with, and it's usually not in Vegas.

Polaris ran their 2025 summit with 40 plus educational breakout courses, actual content, a buzzing trade show floor plus a night at Disney's California Adventure instead of another night at another Vegas club. And that's just one example. Every major TSD is running their own flagship event now, and those events, they're more curated, they're more relevant, and they're more valuable to the advisor's actual business.

So why would a TA on the East Coast, for example, book a four plus hour flight to Vegas, spend two grand in a hotel room, rent a car blow a week out of their entire schedule. When they can just drive to a regional [00:11:00] summit or hit one of the TSD events and get more actual enablement in two days, they're not going to, and a lot of 'em aren't.

I had an advisor tell me straight up, I've actively campaigned against going to channel partners this year 'cause I don't see value in it. I don't want to participate. And when I dug into why. It's always the same version of the same thing because we're done being a prop in someone else's marketing photo.

We want real support from people who actually move our business forward. That tension, it's not going away. If anything, it's getting worse.



So now we're gonna go down the rabbit hole because this isn't just about events. This is about what vendors are actually spending their partner enablement dollars on an industry report late last year, laid this out pretty clearly. Partners are complaining that some vendors still structure incentives [00:12:00] around one-off product transactions instead of ongoing lifecycle engagements.

MDF is hard to claim and the criteria for MDF don't match real world marketing realities. Partners want MDF that funds activities proven to generate leads, not activities that look good on a quarterly report or LinkedIn page translation. Vendors are budgeting for the stuff that makes vendor marketing teams look busy.

Booth footprints branded, swag sponsored cocktail hours, photo ops with executives on LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the advisors, the people who actually sell their product are begging for basic lead gen support and getting told, sorry, no, that there's just no budget this quarter for that.

Like if you ran a commercial fishing operation and you hired a bunch of fishermen, you bought the boats, you rented the dock space, and then you turned around and [00:13:00] told the fishermen, good luck. We don't have a budget for bait nets or fishing pools. Like you, you would be out of business in six months, but that's the model.

A lot of the vendors and the TSDs are running on the channel side right now. The boats are the vendor partnerships. The fishermen are the advisors, and the bait is the leads and enablement tools. They actually need to catch anything. You can't skip the bait and then act surprised when nothing's biting.

I'm, I'm gonna put the, the day job badge on, right. I work at a UCAS vendor called Level 365, and one of the reasons our death to fake uc message is resonating with partners right now is because it's not just branding. We're actually putting muscle behind enablement at an advisor level. So qualified opportunities, engineering support on real deals, co-branded content advisors can plug directly into their sales motion, not just a training video that tells them how to fish.

And yeah, [00:14:00] lead lists and warm leads because advisors need the bait. See, that's the difference, and it's the difference that separates the vendors who will grow their channel in 2026 and beyond, from the vendors who will be explaining declining pipeline to the board in Q3.



Now this episode is not a doom and gloom episode around channel partners. Um, what I want to do is to give advice, right? If you're a vendor, here's what you need to ask yourself right now. One, where did your last 10 channel sourced wins actually come from? Was it a booth interaction at Channel Partners or was it a conversation that started in A TSD Slack channel or an advisor who got a qualified lead from you a deal?

Your PDM help you co co-sell, and I'm willing to bet it's most likely that. Second bucket two. [00:15:00] What does your MDF program actually fund? If the answer is big events. Logo placement and vendor hosted dinners. You're funding marketing theater, not pipeline three. If you pulled your entire channel partner's budget and redirected it into advisor enablement, leads, content engineering support, shared marketing campaigns, would you see more or less pipeline next year?

I, I know what I think the answer would be, but. To you advisors here. What I'm gonna ask you, one, which events actually drive business? Not which events are fun, not which events are having the best parties, which ones translate into real deals? Two, where do you actually get your best vendor? Intel, the show floor or your TSD portal?

Pure [00:16:00] Communities and direct relationships. Three. What vendors are investing in you, not their own brand's visibility, but in your ability to close more business. That's your shortlist. Those are the partnerships to lean into, and everyone else are just renting space in your inbox.



All right, Brian, so what's the takeaway? Well, the old guard model of the channel is a changing and Channel Partners 2026 is one of the loudest signals we've had yet. And that doesn't mean channel Partners is dying 'cause it's not. There's still real value in a once a year Super Bowl gathering of the whole channel ecosystem.

The networking is real. The serendipity is real. And for the first time advisors trying to meet vendors, well, it's still a great entry point, but the center of gravity has [00:17:00] moved. The actual work, the the strategy, the education, the enablement, the deal momentum, it's all happening in smaller, more curated environments.

TSD summits. Peer groups, private vendor, round tables, advisor to advisor communities, and the vendors who figure this out fast are going to win the channel.

And the vendors who keep writing quarter million dollar booth checks while starving their advisors for actual tools and leads, now those vendors are going to watch their pipeline quietly dry up while their CMO posts reels about channel velocity. Here's the prescription. If you're a vendor, stop budgeting for vendor theater and start budgeting for partner empowerment.

Ask every advisor what they need and actually deliver it. And if you're an advisor, stop flying out to events based on obligation. Pick two or three that are actually moving your business and invest deeply in those and let the rest [00:18:00] go.

And if you're a channel manager, stop being the messenger who tells advisors no. Become the person inside your company who fights for real enablement budget because that's what, frankly moves the needle. The channel is shifting. Meet it where it's actually going, not where it used to be.



So let's go back to that half empty robber Irvine keynote I opened with. Here's what's wild about that. The content wasn't bad. It was really good. The speaker wasn't bad. He was really good, and I'm a big fan. The production wasn't bad. Again, really good. The audience just wasn't there. And that's the story of the 2026 Channel Partners event.

Great content. Great speakers, great production being delivered to a room that's quietly moving somewhere else. If you're one of the vendors, advisors, or PDMs or channel managers still figuring [00:19:00] out what to do about it, you're not alone. Everyone is figuring this out in real time. I mean, the event was even different from just what it was last year, but going forward, the ones who are figuring it out first, they're the ones who are eating everybody else's lunch.

Going into the rest this year and beyond. So here's what I want you to do. If today's episode of CX without the BS resonated, go ahead and give it a share. Share it with an advisor, a vendor, a, a channel leader. Um, go ahead, tag me on LinkedIn. You can find me, Brian Nichols. Uh, and by the way, hit subscribe if you're joining us here on YouTube so you don't miss a single episode of CX without the bs, because we've got a lot more to unpack about what's coming down the road for the channel this year.

And of course if you wanna push back on anything I said today, go down below into the comments here on LinkedIn or over on YouTube. Let me know your thoughts. Or if you wanna, you know, keep it private, shoot me a message here on LinkedIn. Um, but otherwise, until next time, this has been Brian Nichols signing off.

You're on CX without a bs. We'll see you next [00:20:00] time.