Context
Many companies spend heavily on partner incentives, discounts, rebates, MDF, and deal protections without being fully confident those investments are driving the right behavior. Programs evolve over time, exceptions accumulate, and internal teams inherit structures that are difficult to explain, difficult to govern, and hard to measure. The pattern holds whether the company is a mid-market SaaS firm scaling two-tier distribution, a growth-stage ISV optimizing partner economics ahead of a funding round, or an enterprise software vendor renovating a decade of accumulated program complexity.
The symptoms usually show up in the field first. Channel confusion, inconsistent partner performance, unclear attribution, margin leakage, and ongoing debate about whether incentive dollars are helping the business or simply subsidizing noise.
Brushton helps companies rebuild these systems with greater commercial discipline. We work across partner incentives, revenue attribution, deal registration, pricing and discount logic, tiering frameworks, and broader monetization structures so the commercial model supports scale rather than slowing it down.
What we help clients solve
- Bring discipline and clarity to fragmented incentive and rebate programs.
- Align incentive spend with the behaviors that actually drive durable growth, whether that's enterprise expansion, SMB activation, or AI-native consumption motions.
- Simplify tiers, rules, and exceptions that make programs hard to understand.
- Reduce margin leakage from unmanaged discounts and deal-by-deal negotiations.
- Clarify how partner-influenced, sourced, and co-sell deals are attributed and rewarded.
- Connect incentives and commercial rules directly to ARR and profitability goals.
Core capabilities
How we work
We start by assessing the current economic model, governance process, and field behavior around incentives and commercial rules. Then we identify where the program is misaligned. Overspending, under-incentivizing, rewarding the wrong activity, creating friction in the sales cycle, or obscuring accountability.
From there, we redesign the framework with a sharper logic for eligibility, tiers, performance thresholds, measurement, and decision rights. The output is a program that field teams can explain, finance can govern, and leadership can use to make investment decisions with confidence.
When the channel structure also needs work, incentive design connects directly to Channel Strategy & Partner Ecosystems. When the commercial model needs broader redesign, the work flows into Commercial Strategy & Enterprise GTM.
Why Brushton
Brendan led Microsoft's enterprise partner incentives organization during a major cloud-first shift, overseeing a $1.2B global incentive portfolio for 400+ partners and launching Microsoft's first Cloud Solution Provider incentive model, which enabled scalable partner participation in Azure and Office 365 across the SMB segment. He founded the Microsoft Dynamics Deal Desk, which delivered $119M in annual commercial impact on a $1.4B business through renewal rate recovery and discount discipline. Earlier, as a key contributor to the Open License evolution, he helped add Software Assurance as the first recurring revenue model for Microsoft's SMB segment distributed through Tech Data and Ingram Micro.
Brushton architected Intuit's QuickBooks Online partner incentive framework across three channels (transactional referral, single-tier wholesale, and two-tier indirect provider), designing a five-tier partner segmentation model that drove cloud revenue growth at QBO 2.6x the rate of legacy QuickBooks Desktop products. More recently, Brushton has advised AI-native platforms on how to design incentive structures for consumption-based products where the unit economics shift as usage compounds.
Clients come to Brushton when they need incentive and commercial design to do more than support the channel. They need it to shape behavior, protect economics, and drive growth with greater precision, whether the buyer is Fortune 500, mid-market, or the ISV they're trying to activate into their ecosystem.
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