Microsoft channel executive Julie Sanford has joined Stripe as head of global partner marketing, taking over the company’s partner go-to-market strategy at a time when the payments vendor is overhauling its partner program and channel economics in the AI era are a top priority for solution providers.
Sanford, who previously served as vice president of go-to-market, programs and operations for Microsoft’s Global Partner Solutions organization, updated her LinkedIn account to reflect the move. She is now responsible for leading the strategy and programs that power Stripe’s partner GTM motion across a complex ecosystem spanning platforms, SIs, technology partnerships, financial partners, and a fast-growing cohort of AI companies. Her team will focus on building the coherent marketing strategy, operating model, and infrastructure needed to scale Stripe’s partner business as it becomes an increasingly important driver of growth.
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Stripe’s partner ecosystem includes members of the 2026 CRN Solution Provider 500 like Accenture, Infosys, Insight, Slalom and other businesses with a variety of partner business models. In April, the payment technology vendor updated its partner program with new standards covering technical expertise, business impact and customer success, raising the bar for partner participation.
Legacy And New Opportunities
Sanford worked at Microsoft for about 20 years, ascending the ranks from group product manager for the Project desktop business to the VP roles she held for about five years. She made CRN’s Channel Chiefs list multiple times.
Manu Gopinath, president of solution provider UST, told CRN in a recent interview that Microsoft and the other hyperscalers remain important partners to the company even as it pursues deeper relationships with AI startups like Anthropic. Gopinath and his team have seen greater opportunities lately helping clients handle the wave of agentic AI, handling whether large language models (LLMs) are the appropriate tool for a client’s given issue and how to apply the technology to verticals ranging from health care to banking, while also handling new business models in consulting, including outcome-based approaches.
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“Customer conversations are about, ‘Hey, I don’t want to just buy talent or just seats. Can you promise an outcome at a much better cost point?’ Gopinath said. “For us, it’s moving more toward an outcome-based, a performance-based (approach). ‘Can you guarantee performance and outcome versus let me buy these software seats and try to play around with it with you guys and make it work?’ That’s starting to shift.”
Although Sanford’s new role doesn’t explicitly mention outcome-based business models, the changing economic model is one Stripe has studied, as evident in an article the vendor published in late 2025 about how solution providers can use that pricing model to get paid in new ways such as for each support ticket resolved and per hour of equipment uptime delivered.
