Most channel strategy is written from the opposite assumption: that the vendor is the center of gravity, and partners orbit accordingly. Convene enough meetings, launch enough campaigns, and the assumption is that alignment will follow. It rarely does.
What tends to follow instead is a partner ecosystem that looks busy on a dashboard and produces very little, because nobody stopped to ask whether the partner could actually pick up what was handed to them and run with it unassisted.
That distinction sits at the center of how Lily Lazarevski thinks about channel marketing. As Global Channel & Cloud Marketing Director at Infoblox, she has spent her career at the intersection of marketing, alliances, and commercial strategy, and Infoblox itself makes the question unavoidable. The company sells almost entirely through partners, largely two-tier through distribution, which means the vendor rarely gets to be the center of gravity even if it wanted to be.
The Partner Is the First Audience
Ask Lily whether marketing has undergone a shift from a discipline measured by visibility to one accountable for enterprise value, and she pushes back gently. That shift has not really been her experience.
Every discipline she has worked in was accountable for value creation and expected to demonstrate it, starting agency-side in public relations with financial, legal, and technology clients, where every program was anchored to a commercial outcome. Awareness mattered only insofar as it moved a brand toward something more valuable: being genuinely distinct from the alternatives.
What did change her thinking was structural rather than philosophical. Infoblox’s two-tier distribution model forces a conclusion many marketers can avoid. “Our first audience is not the end customer,” Lily says. “It is the partner, deciding whether to spend their seller’s time on us or on somebody else.”
That is not license to think about the customer less, she is careful to note. It requires the opposite. What a partner needs is a genuine grasp of the customer’s problem and how the joint solution resolves it, because that grasp is what allows the partner to be the one who solves it. Infoblox understands the customer deeply so the partner can be handed something to be the hero with. A campaign can be excellent, in Lily’s framing, and if the partner cannot pick it up and use it, produce nothing at all.
Marketing has to sit where the commercial decisions get made, she argues. Anywhere else, it is left explaining decisions it had no hand in. Visibility is a means. What matters is whether a partner can carry the story into a customer conversation without Infoblox there.
What Actually Makes an Ecosystem Compound?
Whether sheer size makes an ecosystem stronger is arguable – past a point it can strain alignment as much as fund it. What Lily Lazarevski takes from the hyperscalers is narrower and harder to dispute: they have built a reach no company Infoblox’s size ever could, and the smart move is to borrow it rather than envy it. So, she built a team to do exactly that – including a dedicated cloud marketer – co-marketing inside the AWS and Google Cloud ecosystems, plugging into a gravity Infoblox could amplify but not manufacture alone.
What makes an ecosystem actually compound, in her view, is when partners can build on what they have been given without needing Infoblox in the room. Short of that threshold, in her assessment, most companies are flattering themselves, calling a set of separate relationships an ecosystem when they are really holding it together by hand.
Reaching that threshold, Lily Lazarevski maintains, is marketing’s job rather than the partner’s. When you are not the biggest name in the room, a partner’s appetite has to be earned rather than assumed, and there is real work in earning it. But when a motion still needs Infoblox to convene it, the more useful question is the one she can act on: were the economics made clear enough, was the program simple enough to run? Appetite is built over time; friction can be removed now.“What gets read as partner hesitation is almost never disloyalty,” she says. “Usually we made it slightly too hard, and something easier was sitting next to it.” That instinct, that friction rather than loyalty is usually the culprit, reappears throughout Lily’s career, across markets that could not be more different from one another.
Global Coherence, Local Intelligence
These programs, in Lily Lazarevski account, start in both directions, and she has learned not to be dogmatic about which. Sometimes a program is inspired top-down by company-wide strategy. Just as often the need surfaces bottom-up, in a geography where conditions happen to be riper for it, and that in turn feeds the wider strategy.
What matters less is where a program originates than what happens next. It has to be built into programs across the business so there is consistency, while staying customized enough locally to remain relevant and actually drive commercial impact.
The examples she knows best all began regionally, which she attributes partly to where she has spent her career, most of it inside a single region at a time. Three times now, at Dell, at Akamai, and at Infoblox, something she built for a single market ended up adopted company-wide: a content syndication pilot for partners that started in the UK, an MDF return-on-investment model built for EMEA, and a partner marketing blueprint she created in what was, by her account, Infoblox’s first dedicated regional channel marketing role.
None of the three was conceived as a global framework. Each was an answer to a specific challenge in a specific market, and each traveled because it had already survived contact with reality.
That history has shaped how Lily Lazarevski thinks about the underlying question. A global framework, in her view, should define the narrative, the priority use cases, the motions the company is prepared to fund, and the definition of success. It should not strictly specify tactics, because the region will know better which partners to lead with, what a credible event looks like there, and what language the buyer actually uses.
The test she applies is whether a regional marketer looks at what has been built and sees something that saves them work. “Everyone is moving at a million miles an hour,” Lily Lazarevski says. “If a programme arrives ready to run – relevant, meaningful and obviously worth the time – it gets used. If it arrives needing to be reverse-engineered and made fit for purpose first, it will not, simple as that.”
What surprised her is how far localization takes a program, and where it stops. A team can translate properly, swap in case studies from that market, use examples the audience recognizes, and genuinely understand how buying happens there, and some programs still will not gain the traction they found elsewhere.
That took her a while to accept, because the instinct when something underperforms in a region is to assume the adaptation was not thorough enough. Often the adaptation was fine, and the conditions were not: the partner ecosystem sits at a different stage of maturity there, the category is less established, partners in that market make their money a different way, or the buyer simply is not asking that question yet. A program built where the conditions were ripe carries assumptions about those conditions that nobody ever wrote down.
So, the question Lily Lazarevski tries to ask before a program travels is what the localization depends on. If the conditions that made it work in the first place cannot be named, there is no real way of knowing whether it will work somewhere else.
Alignment Is a Measurement Problem
Much has been written about breaking down organizational silos, but the overlooked ingredient, in Lily’s estimation, is less romantic than shared purpose: how success gets defined and measured.
Teams align, she argues, when what they are measured on genuinely depends on someone else’s work. Where alignment proves hardest, it is usually because two or three functions are working to definitions of the same outcome that do not quite match. Nobody is being difficult; each is simply doing precisely what was asked of them.
Channel sits at the center of a hub and spoke, with sales, field marketing, business development, and alliances all connecting through it, which makes it a natural place for those mismatches to surface first. More joint planning rarely settles them on its own, in her experience.
What does help is agreeing the definitions and the measurement at the outset, so everyone is working toward the same shape of success, and then keeping that agreement current, because the business moves and the definitions quietly stop fitting.
The second factor is simpler still: knowing who owns what. A surprising share of what gets diagnosed as a silo problem, Lily Lazarevski has found, is plain ambiguity, two teams each assuming the other had it, or both doing it slightly differently until a partner pointed it out. Culture matters, she says, but she would put it third. “I have never seen good relationships survive misaligned targets for long,” she says.
Three Constants Across Fourteen Years
Asked which leadership principles have held steady amid accelerating technological change and rising ecosystem complexity, Lily Lazarevski names three. The first is that clarity is a necessity, not just a kindness. Complexity, in her view, is often how a decision gets postponed. Naming five priorities, or ten, avoids the harder work of deciding which one actually matters.
Every time she has forced herself to cut a message down to one or two points, execution improved. Left undecided early, focus disperses, and the outcome either does not arrive or arrives much later, after far more iterations and at a cost in time, resource, and investment that a harder conversation at the outset would have saved.
The second is that she builds to last. “I try to build things that outlast me,” Lily Lazarevski says. Early in her career she mistook being indispensable for being valuable, and now prizes the opposite: work solid enough to keep running once she has moved on to whatever is next.
That thread runs through the work she is proudest of: an investment model still in use at a company she has left, and a regional blueprint that became the global standard after she moved on from the region. A program that only works while she is in the room, in her framing, is a dependency; one that keeps producing without her is a capability – and capability is the harder, more valuable thing to build.
The third is quieter, and she would not want to leave it out. People contribute differently, and the loudest contribution is not reliably the best one. Someone whose style is less forceful or less extroverted is not someone with less to offer, and a team where only the confident are heard operates well below its actual capability.
So, she takes care that everyone has a route to being heard, and that this respect for differences functions as a working habit rather than a value on a slide. It costs very little, in her account, and it changes what a team is able to produce.
None of the three, she notes, is really about technology, which is probably why they have lasted. Across fourteen years and a variety of companies, the channels, the tooling, and what the industry calls things have changed completely. What a team needs to do good work has not.
Betting Without a Business Case
Data has become central to decision-making everywhere, yet transformative growth often starts with a conviction nobody can yet validate against historical performance. Lily’s answer to that tension resists the premise that analysis and conviction are opposing forces. What matters more, in her account, is how much a leader is prepared to commit before certainty arrives.
Her method is to break a bold initiative into increments: a test bed of one region, a handful of partners, a defined window. That produces hard data far sooner than a business case would, and it also surfaces softer signals that tend to be undervalued, what customers and partners say unprompted, what colleagues report back, where the industry appears to be heading.
“None of us has a crystal ball, and pretending otherwise produces worse decisions than admitting it,” V says. The bet she is running currently is agentic AI inside channel marketing: automated executive reporting, AI-assisted segmentation of campaign content and joint value proposition messaging, and agents handling the mechanics around joint and multi-vendor partner assets, events, invitations, landing pages, and follow-up sequences.
There is no historical performance data for any of it, because nobody has been doing it long enough to have generated any. So rather than building a business case around projected returns, Lily Lazarevski chose processes where the cost of a bad output was low and immediately visible and ran them in parallel with the existing method.
The part people tend to skip, she notes, is the stopping rule. Agreeing in advance what success looks like is easy. Failure is much harder to define ahead of time, because by the time a team gets there, somebody’s reputation is already attached to the outcome.
The failure mode she watches for most closely is scaling too early: a pilot works, and the temptation is to treat that result as proof rather than as a signal, to go broad before establishing why it worked, and then discover that what made it succeed was something local nobody had identified.
“The discipline is not in being willing to be wrong,” she says. “It is in setting things up so that being wrong surfaces early and costs less.” And that, she notes, is as much cultural as procedural – a team only calls its own failures early when doing so is treated as good judgement, not a black mark. Data, in her framing, does not remove the need for judgment. It narrows the range of things a leader has to take on conviction and makes the conviction that remains easier to hold.
Competitive advantage in enterprise technology is increasingly framed as a question of orchestration rather than execution. Lily Lazarevski pushes back on the “rather than.” Orchestration without execution, she argues, is only an intention. Some of the most elegantly designed go-to-market plans never came to life, because the people expected to run them did not have the budget, the systems access, or the authority the plan quietly assumed.
What has genuinely changed, in her account, is the unit of work itself. Ten years ago, a campaign was something a marketing team could largely complete on its own. The equivalent piece of work now spans a hyperscaler’s programme rules, a distributor’s systems, a partner’s sellers and marketers, and Infoblox’s own field teams.
When activating co-marketing across AWS and Google Cloud, the hard part is never the creative. Each runs to a different fiscal calendar and its own co-marketing mechanics – different approval thresholds, different claim processes – and none of it lines up with Infoblox’s. No two parties even define the funnel stages the same way, down to the basic question of what counts as a qualified opportunity.
A hyperscaler, in Lily’s telling, is not one counterparty but many: partner development managers, account teams aligned to specific customers, regional marketing leads, programme owners, and sellers carrying their own quota, most of whom have never met each other, let alone Infoblox.
Layer Infoblox’s own field and channel teams and the partner’s sellers over the top, and the number of people who have to agree before anything happens becomes considerable. Somebody has to reconcile all of it before a single asset is worth producing, and reconciling it once is not the end, because the whole arrangement has to add up to joint success rather than three organizations each hitting their own number separately. That is harder than it sounds when priorities compete and any one of the parties can pivot strategy mid-program, which, in her experience, they do.
Measurement has moved too. Lily’s team built a dashboard with the company’s analytics group that tracks marketing-attributed marketplace transactions, a category of activity that did not meaningfully exist five years ago and which, by her observation, most marketing functions still cannot see.
That shift has changed what she looks for when she hires. She would now take someone who understands partner economics and can navigate multiple organizations over someone with a stronger campaign portfolio. Creative craft still matters, in her view, but it’s no longer the constraint. “The constraint is whether it can be run by people who do not work for you,” Lily Lazarevski says.
The Convention Worth Leaving Behind
Asked which convention in channel marketing the industry should leave behind, Lily Lazarevski does not hesitate: the assumption that partners want more. Almost every instinct in channel marketing points toward addition, another campaign, another portal, another enablement session, another newsletter, and she admits to having been guilty of it herself.
The logic feels sound: partners are busy and distracted, so give them more reasons to engage. The effect, in practice, is the opposite. A partner marketing manager carrying eight vendors receives eight versions of the same impulse, and the rational response is to ignore all of it and answer whichever email came from someone they actually know.
The clearest lesson came early in her career. At Dell, she inherited an EMEA market development fund program spread across more than thirty partner plans, and the budget was cut. Her team restructured it around a much smaller number of things.
“Less money, deployed with more discipline, outperformed more money spread thinly,” she says. What she took from the experience is that constraint often produces the discipline itself, and that it is worth imposing that discipline voluntarily before circumstances impose it.
The convention she would leave behind, then, is measuring marketing by what it produces: assets created, campaigns launched, funds deployed. All of those numbers can rise while partner engagement falls.
What she would replace them with is simpler: how much of what was made got used, by how many partners, whether they came back and used it again, and whether it produced the outcome it was built for. That last part, in her view, has to be settled before a program is built, because without it there is no honest way to measure it afterward.
Easy to Partner With
Asked how Infoblox positions itself as an indispensable collaborator rather than merely another technology vendor, Lily’s answer is almost deliberately low-key: the practical goal is to be easy to partner with. That sounds modest, she acknowledges, but it is usually what decides how much of a partner’s own momentum ends up behind the relationship. A partner’s attention has to be earned each time, not assumed.
“We work for it, and we stay close at every step – the easier we are to work with, the less of that effort goes on friction that should not have been there in the first place,” she says.
Three things make the difference, in her account. Partners need to be able to explain the joint value themselves, in their own words, to a customer who has asked something Infoblox did not plan for, rather than reading from a slide. They need material they can co-brand without rebuilding it. And they need to know that when they commit their sellers’ time, Infoblox will show up.
Concretely, that has meant activating joint marketing across the major cloud providers rather than treating hyperscaler work as a separate specialism, building the measurement to see what it produced, and moving investment toward the partners and programs that are actually converting. It has also meant creating forums, partner advisory boards and structured surveys, where partners can say plainly what is not working. The value of those forums, in Lily’s view, is precisely that they can be uncomfortable.
It isn’t that she’d downplay the technology – she’d want a partner to call it good and genuinely differentiated, and she has no interest in underselling it; it’s a real reason customers choose Infoblox. But Infoblox sells through partners, and a partner has a shelf of strong products to put in front of a customer. What decides which one they lead with – whose sellers’ time they spend – isn’t that the product is good, because the others are good too. It’s being easy to work with and dependable at turning that time into results: pipeline that closes for the partner, and problems that get solved for the customer.“In an ecosystem where everyone’s product demonstrates well”, she says, “that is the actual differentiator.” Simplicity, Capability, and the Discipline Nobody Applauds
Effective commercial strategies often look deceptively simple from the outside, which is exactly the illusion Lily Lazarevski wants to correct. Edsger Dijkstra, she points out, had it right when he observed that complexity tends to sell better than simplicity does. The simple version takes longer to reach, and it takes some education to appreciate once a person has it.
To simplify something accurately, in her view, requires understanding the complexity sitting underneath it first.
“Simplification is a product of mastery, not a substitute for it,” she says.
Complexity does not disappear when something is simplified. It moves. In the channel, that dynamic is unusually stark: if Infoblox does not absorb the complexity internally, the partner absorbs it, with less patience and less context for it than Infoblox has. So the work becomes deciding what to hold and what to hide. The deals that do not fit the rules, the exceptions made and why, the trade-offs behind a decision, those stay internal.
“What the partner sees should be one clear thing to do next,” Lily Lazarevski says.
She has also learned to distrust simplicity that arrived too easily. It is far easier to simplify something not properly understood, and the result tends to be “confident, tidy and wrong.” The version that survives contact with a partner, in her experience, is almost always the one that took longer to reach.
That same discipline extends to how she measures her own team’s work. The demand numbers still stand – MQLs, qualified pipeline, marketing-sourced bookings; every marketing team carries those and channel is no exception. What she watches for on top of them is something the channel’s usual activity metrics miss. Most of the channel runs on activity – partners enabled, MDF deployed, deal registrations logged, campaigns downloaded – the numbers that fill a QBR and roll up to a board, and most of those, in her view, measure Infoblox’s own output rather than the partner’s. A partner can open every newsletter, sit through every webinar and download every sales play, and none of it tells her the thing she most wants to know: whether that partner is getting more capable by running its own motions and campaigns rather than leaning on Infoblox to run them, than it was a quarter ago.
The questions worth asking are different ones: which partners can now run a motion without Infoblox, which have repeated it, and which have started bringing their own ideas rather than responding to Infoblox’s. Those are slower measures to gather, and slower to show results.
The operational change underneath that shift is automation. A significant share of what her team spent its time on last year, reporting, adapting content for different markets, the mechanics of running an event, is now supported by AI workflows and agents. That is not a headcount argument, in her framing.
“The point of automating is to move the team’s time toward the part of the job a machine can’t touch: sitting across from a partner and reading whether they’re genuinely committed or just being polite, hearing what isn’t working before it reaches a dashboard, and building enough trust to plan with a partner – a genuinely joint plan both sides own, not an Infoblox plan they sign off on or a partner plan we react to. AI can draft the email. It can’t earn the trust that makes a partner read it.”
Resilience, in the sense the question intends it, mostly comes down to not being the single point of failure inside your own ecosystem. If every joint motion needs an Infoblox person to convene it, Lily Lazarevski argues, the company has not built an ecosystem.
“We have built ourselves a workload,” she says.
The Capability That Outlasts You
Asked what enduring contribution she would want her career to represent, independent of revenue or programs delivered, Lily Lazarevski resists the premise slightly. For a channel marketing leader, she argues, revenue is the evidence of capability, not an alternative to it. A team that builds genuine capability and produces no commercial result did not, in her assessment, actually build the capability.
That said, she trained as a teacher before any of this. She holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, and spent a year learning that a person has not taught anything until someone else can do it without them, a description she finds fits channel marketing reasonably well. Everything she has built that lasted was something a partner or colleague could operate after she stopped paying attention to it.
“Documented, transferable, unglamorous,” she says. “It doesn’t win awards, but it’s what a business keeps drawing on.” On mentoring, she credits two formal relationships without which she would describe her career quite differently. The first came at Akamai, through a structured program. Her mentor was a senior sales leader running one of what she describes as the largest regions in the business, who commanded a particular kind of respect from colleagues that Lily Lazarevski paid close attention to. Watching a woman lead at that level, and be visibly regarded for it, changes what a person thinks is available to them. The second mentorship came through a leadership initiative at Infoblox.
What she took from both mentors, she says, was less advice than distance. A mentor has no stake in the immediate problem, which is exactly what lets them ask why it was framed that way in the first place. Most of the value was in being taken out of her own head, handed a different reading of an opportunity, or of a difficulty she had already written off as unsolvable. She would now say more firmly than she would have a decade ago that everybody should have one.
Going the other direction, Lily Lazarevski leads a team of seven, four reporting to her directly and three where she sits as skip manager. Lateral advocacy matters to her a great deal, and this year she built a six-module peer coaching program inside the team, with no seniority filter on who coaches whom. Nobody knows everything, and years of experience, in her view, are a poor proxy for who has the useful answer on a given day.
The logic is specific to running a global team: her geo leads across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific and Japan work in partner ecosystems at genuinely different stages of maturity, so they meet the same problems years apart rather than together. Somebody’s live crisis is very often a problem a colleague came out the other side of ten months earlier. Left alone, that knowledge simply stays where it happened.
What she had not fully anticipated is what the program has done for individual contributors. Running a coaching module, she has found, is one of the few ways someone without direct reports gets to practice leading, to be the person others bring a problem to, and to discover whether they actually enjoy it. It isn’t a promotion, but it gives people the experience a promotion usually assumes they already have, and she thinks it’s worth asking where they were supposed to get it otherwise.
“None of it needs me in the room, which is rather the point,” Lily Lazarevski says. She is, by her own account, considerably more interested in what comes next than in looking back. “Ask me the legacy question in ten years,” she says.
Also Read :- CIO Times Magazine For More Information
