The 12 most common partnerships and co-selling mistakes and how to fix them for industrial manufacturing in Latin America

This edition of the Growth Broker playbook is written for COOs and heads of commercial for mid-market industrial manufacturers operating in Latin America. In this market, LATAM buyers reward hands-on partnership, local presence, and clear commercial terms, so the way you install partnerships and co-selling has to be shaped to that reality from day one.

Every partnerships and co-selling failure we have investigated maps to one of the mistakes below. They repeat because they are structurally easy to make.

Mistake one, the foundational one: signing MOUs no one operationalises. Fix by naming an owner and writing kill criteria before you spend a dollar.

Mistake two: mistaking volume for progress. Fix by making sourced and influenced pipeline from partners the only weekly headline number.

Inside industrial manufacturing, the binding constraint is almost always distribution and account access, not product, and in Latin America it is compounded by the fact that local partnership depth, not marketing spend is what actually gates growth. Partnerships and co-selling is only useful here when it is pointed at both constraints at once.

Mistake three: buying tools before defining the workflow. Fix by drawing the workflow on paper first and buying only what the paper shows.

Mistake four: shipping without a quality gate. Fix by requiring a human eyeball on every artefact for the first four weeks.

Mistake five: ignoring the trigger. Partnerships and co-selling works when one great partner is worth ten marketing hires; without a real trigger the model is guesswork.

Mistake six through twelve: cascade from the first five. Fix the top five and most of the others resolve themselves inside a month.

Concretely for industrial manufacturing in Latin America: a single named-account win in industrial pays back the program many times over, and one properly-installed LATAM account becomes a reference across the region. That is the reason it is worth installing partnerships and co-selling deliberately for this market rather than importing a playbook designed for somewhere else.