Why 28 Moments Matter More Than 1 Transaction

Why 28 Moments Matter More Than 1 Transaction

Feeling incredibly fortunate to have spent the past 5 days in Cairns attending Foundry’s Edge Channel Conference, and absorbing like a sponge the various keynotes and panels presented by the sharpest minds across the tech ecosystem. Credit where it is due, the ANZ Foundry team put on an absolute masterclass in multidisciplinary channel experience this year at Edge, and a genuine thank you to the speaker line-up for so generously sharing their time and insights with the channel.

Since returning home and with time to reflect, I’d like to share one example from the opening keynote which has stuck with me all week and unpack what it means for GTM planning here in New Zealand.

What we heard at Edge

The opening keynote walked through a real AstraZeneca deal, using it to make a point about how the channel works now. AWS touched that deal directly, twice. On paper, AWS had the better product, a five-year head start and, by most measures, the better price. AWS still lost the deal to Microsoft, who won it through three partners delivering five separate projects, months before it ever showed up as a tracked opportunity anywhere. As the speaker noted, Microsoft has now outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters, largely on the back of this partner led approach.

The bigger idea behind that story is what the research calls the “28 moments“: the number of distinct touches a customer now moves through before making a decision, followed by a recurring cycle every 30 days after that, forever. An average deal apparently involves 6.3 partners; enterprise or public sector deals often see 10 or more. That is a long way from the simple MQL to SQL to close model; most of us grew up building our marketing stacks around.

We also heard where the money is actually going. In the space of a few months, Google has committed $750 million to the channel, OpenAI $150 million, Anthropic $100 million and SAP €100 million, while Salesforce wrote a $50 million cheque despite only around 15% of its business being resold. Dell has reportedly shifted billions back into consulting and earlier stage engagement; a move Michael Dell is said to have called a massive shift for the business. None of that money is landing at the point of sale. According to the keynote, 43 years of channel economics built around front-end margin, back-end margin and rebates at close, are being pulled apart and rebuilt around the full customer journey instead.

Predictions from Edge

Pulling together what was presented, a few predictions stood out to me for where this is heading over the next 18 months and beyond:

• Vendors and agencies that keep measuring GTM success mainly through point-of-sale metrics, such as deal registration, rebates and MQL volume, will keep losing share to competitors who fund and track the full 28 moment journey, particularly the early advisory stage that happens well before a deal is visible.
• The winners in this shift will not necessarily have the better product. They will have better visibility into, and better relationships across, the partners already sitting inside their customer’s buying committee.
• MQLs will increasingly be treated as a lagging indicator rather than a leading one. By the time a webinar registration or whitepaper download fires, a deal may already have been running for months through a partner’s advisory work, invisible to marketing automation entirely.

My advice for GTM teams

New Zealand has a structural advantage here. Our market is small and relationship dense; today’s customer is tomorrow’s colleague, next week’s competitor and the week after that, your distributor. Mapping which partners are already sitting inside a customer’s decision is a far more achievable exercise here than in a larger, noisier market like the US, provided teams are deliberate about doing it.

A few practical steps I would suggest to any GTM team here reading this:

• Map your own version of the 28 moments for your key segments, from first awareness through to renewal. Most teams have mapped a funnel, not a journey, and the gap between the two is where deals are being lost.
• Identify which partners are already touching each of those moments, and just as importantly, which moments currently have no partner presence at all. Those gaps are likely where competitors are quietly winning business you never see coming.
• Rebalance a portion of your MDF and co-marketing budget away from event sponsorship and generic top of funnel campaigns, toward funding partner led advisory content and early-stage enablement, where deals actually get decided.
• Build a parallel view of partner sourced pipeline signal, even if it is harder to quantify than your MQL dashboard. Treat it as your leading indicator, not an afterthought.

The channel has not just gotten bigger. It has gotten earlier. The GTM teams that win the next few years will be the ones showing up in the room before the whiteboard even comes out, not the ones still perfecting their pitch for the moment a customer finally raises a hand.

If you have any questions around you own Go-To-Market approach, we are always here to answer any questions you may have.

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Reflections drawn from the opening keynote and related sessions at the Foundry Edge Channel Conference, Australia, 26 to 28 July 2026.