Partner marketing, seen from both ends of the deal

This is for anyone running partner marketing at a technology vendor, or marketing at one of its partners. Partner marketing is how the two of you go after the same buyer together. The vendor usually has the money and the sales teams. The partner has the customer, and the track record to show for it.

This page covers both sides, and links to the detail on each.

I worked for Microsoft partners before I started Fifty Five and Five, and partner work has stayed with us ever since. The first product we ever built was a tool for Microsoft that covered more than 10,000 of its partners. Years ago we also ranked the UK’s Microsoft partners on their marketing, and we’ve built partner tools for Google and cleaned up SAP’s partner data.

What is partner marketing?

Partner marketing is any marketing a technology vendor does with the firms that resell, implement, run or build on its products. Those partners include resellers and distributors, consultancies, managed service providers (MSPs) and software companies selling through the vendor’s marketplace. It comes in three kinds:

• To-partner marketing is aimed at the partners themselves. It recruits them, trains them and keeps them selling.
• Through-partner marketing gives partners campaigns, content and funds, so they can market the vendor’s products to their own customers under their own name.
• Co-marketing puts both companies on one campaign. It usually comes with co-selling, where the vendor’s sales teams and the partner work the same customer opportunity.

Many programmes run all three at once. A distributor might get to-partner marketing from the vendor, then turn round and run through-partner marketing for the resellers it supplies.

Microsoft now uses the same split. For FY27 it added “a new to-partner category” to its co-op funds, so distributors can invest in engaging and enabling the partners they supply (Microsoft partner blog ).

What does a partner marketing manager do?

At a vendor, a partner marketing manager plans and runs the marketing the company does with its partners. Day to day that means building campaigns and content kits partners can reuse, and running the marketing side of the partner programme. They approve marketing development funds and check the claims, and they work with the channel sales team on which partners to back. At a partner, the job is the other end of the same deal. You need to know what the vendor offers and claim the funds before they expire. Then you turn the vendor’s campaigns into something that sounds like your own firm wrote it. In both jobs you’re responsible for marketing that another company has to run, so much of the work is making it easy for them to do it well.

Is partner marketing the same as channel marketing?

Mostly, but partner marketing is the wider term. Channel marketing grew up around reselling. A vendor marketed to distributors and resellers, and through them to customers, to move its products. The newer term also takes in partners who may never resell anything, such as a consultancy that implements your software or an MSP that runs it for the customer.

Partners are getting harder to put in one box anyway. Omdia’s channel team says customers now work with 6.3 partners on average, and that partners run at least three business models, for example reselling, managed services and professional services (Omdia ). The same research puts partners’ share of the IT market at 66.7% in 2026, down from 70.1% in 2025, as more spending goes to hyperscalers. So a programme built only for resellers misses a lot of the partners a customer works with.

If you’re on the vendor side and want the channel view in depth, our guide to growing channel partner revenue brings together what working partner marketers told us.

What goes into a vendor’s partner marketing strategy?

For a vendor, five things. Vendors have brought us in for the second and the fifth.

1. Know which partners to back. Giving every partner the same enablement treats a ten-person consultancy like a global systems integrator. Our piece on why channel management fails when every partner gets the same enablement covers reading the signals each partner gives off, and our channel partner marketing strategy piece covers the partners who are about to grow before your reports show it.
2. Fix the partner data. Campaigns only reach partners if the records in your partner relationship management (PRM) system are right.
3. Give partners things they’ll use. Most vendors already have a large enablement library, and in the audits we’ve done a lot of it goes unused, which is why we wrote about turning unused partner enablement into channel revenue . The big vendors now give partners campaign platforms too. Microsoft has Partner Marketing Center Pro, and Google Cloud added Gemini content creation to its Partner Marketing Studio in February 2025 (Google Cloud ). Both save partners time. Because every eligible partner gets the same campaigns, leave room for each partner to add its own customers and proof.
4. Fund the marketing. Most big vendors give partners marketing development funds (MDF) or co-op funds, paid back against proof that the marketing ran. Each runs its own version. AWS pays its MDF as cash or AWS Promotional Credits (AWS ), and at Microsoft most of it is called co-op. Our piece on why MDF often doesn’t turn into pipeline covers how the money gets handed out.
5. See what the money produced. There’s a section on that below.

Point 2 is where SAP brought us in. Its partner marketers had built co-branded campaigns and content kits, but about a thousand partner accounts in their PRM had inconsistent names, outdated contacts, and mergers and rebrands the records didn’t show. The campaigns had nowhere to go.

Justin Molloy, Senior Director, SAP Global Partner Marketing, said we “provided a high-value deliverable that directly propelled SAP’s business success within our partner channel”.

How do Microsoft partners market with Microsoft?

Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, which sets what you can claim and how you sell alongside Microsoft. In practice it comes down to the five rows below, and we’ve written a piece on each.

Two of those rows trip people up. Co-op funds have a deadline, and Microsoft says “If you don’t use your earnings by the end of the usage period, you forfeit them” (Microsoft Learn ). ECIF pays for customer projects such as proofs of concept, and Microsoft’s account teams decide which partner gets it, so it can’t fund your campaigns.

You can also co-sell with other partners. Microsoft lists partner to partner as one of its co-sell categories, where you “Work with another Microsoft partner to actively solve a customer problem” (Microsoft Learn ). If a customer already works with about six partners, the others are some of your likeliest introductions.

Microsoft is pushing partners to spend more of their marketing on finding new buyers. Heather Deggans, Microsoft’s vice president for global partner go-to-market, pointed to new Omdia research that found 62% of partners put less than 10% of their marketing budgets into demand generation (Microsoft partner blog ). For FY27, Microsoft directs half of co-op investment at activities that build awareness and pipeline.

Where does partner marketing go wrong?

Usually in the gap between the two companies. The vendor assumes partners will use what it sends, and the partner assumes the vendor’s messaging will do the selling. These are four I’d look for first, from both sides.

• Two logos and nothing new. A co-branded eBook with the vendor’s messaging and the partner’s logo on the cover gives a buyer no reason to read it, or to pick that partner. Our co-marketing piece, in the table above, is about building something a buyer can use instead.
• Partners who sound the same. If a competitor’s name could go on a partner’s home page without changing a word, buyers can’t tell them apart. The MSP marketing piece has checks a partner can run on its own site in an afternoon.
• Funds spent in a rush. Microsoft’s co-op has a hard deadline, and so does most MDF I’ve come across. In my experience a campaign planned in the last month of the period ends up being whatever can be booked in time.
• Checking the paperwork and stopping there. A vendor that only checks claims can’t say what its funds bought.

How do you measure partner marketing ROI?

Measure what the money produced as well as what was claimed, then compare. A claim proves a webinar ran or an advert went out. It doesn’t tell you whether a buyer could find the landing page, or whether it loaded when they did.

I’d look at four levels, in this order:

1. Proof it ran. The claim and its proof of execution, which Microsoft’s co-op already asks for.
2. Quality. Whether it reads well for the buyer, can be found in search and works on a phone.
3. Buyer response. Visits, time spent, form fills and event sign-ups from that partner’s campaign.
4. Pipeline. Registered opportunities, co-sell wins and any deal data the partner will share.

Then compare funded partners against similar partners you didn’t fund, and each partner against its own marketing before the money arrived. A partner whose marketing improves after funding, while similar unfunded partners stay flat, is probably spending it well.

We came to this from the vendor’s side. On one of our trips to Seattle, Microsoft’s partner marketers told us they couldn’t put a number on what their marketing funds bought. So we built them the Partner Benchmarking Tool. The project took eight months. The platform covered more than 10,000 partners and ran more than 40 tests on their content, across $10m of marketing development funds (case study ). How it scored partners, and the checks a vendor can copy, are in how to see what MDF funds produce .

If you’re a partner, the same levels work for one campaign. Start with quality. A campaign page that doesn’t load, or reads like the vendor’s brochure, will score badly on the last two as well.

Where does AI fit in partner marketing?

In the work there were never enough people to do. Microsoft says it enables more than 500,000 partners (Microsoft ). No partner team can read every one of those partners’ websites or tailor enablement for each of them, so most of that work doesn’t get done.

AI agents can now do most of that reading, and keep partner records current as they go. Years before agents, the Partner Benchmarking Tool used machine learning to score the marketing of thousands of partners. More recently our AI data cleaning pipeline got SAP’s partner data ready to use in two weeks. There’s more in our piece on AI agents in partner marketing .

I’d keep a person in the loop on all of it. Let the agent do the reading, and have a person decide what good looks like and check each score before any partner sees a score with its name on it.

So what is partner marketing, and where do you start?

Partner marketing is a vendor and its partners going after the same buyer together. It overlaps with channel marketing, but takes in far more kinds of partner than resellers.

Where you start depends on your side. If you fund partners, start with your partner data and one measure of what your funds produced. If you’re a partner, Microsoft’s or anyone else’s, pick one buyer and the question they’re asking, then check what co-op or MDF you’ve already earned.

We’ve worked on both sides of that. If you’d like a hand with yours, get in touch.

Frequently asked questions