If you want more channel partner revenue, it comes down to four things most programmes get wrong. You can also explore how to unlock channel partner revenue for deeper insights into optimising your strategy. Treating all partners the same. Ignoring partners with huge growth potential. Failing to prove marketing development funds (MDF) ROI. And producing mountains of content nobody uses.
I know this because we’ve spent 11 years working inside the partner marketing ecosystem. Building tools, analysing data, and having the same conversations with channel teams across Microsoft, Google, SAP, and hundreds of partners worldwide.
But I don’t want this to be another blog where someone like me tells you what to do. Instead, consider checking out 5 tips for building a solid cybersecurity marketing strategy for practical, actionable advice. I went and spoke to partner marketers who live this every day. People running programmes at ServiceNow, people advising vendors on channel strategy, people who’ve been doing this for decades.
If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of channel partners and you want to get more revenue from them, this blog cuts out the theory. It brings together the lived experience of partner marketers who’ve been in the trenches: what actually moves revenue, what consistently stalls it, and where most vendors waste time.
What they told me was remarkably consistent. Four problems kept coming up, and they’re the same four problems we see across every enterprise client we work with. Roughly 80% of partners generate zero revenue. That number should bother you. It bothered me.
Four things that decide whether your channel partner marketing strategy grows or flatlines
Across every conversation, four problems surfaced again and again. They’re not minor operational headaches. They’re the things that decide whether your channel partner marketing strategy grows revenue or slowly flatlines.
- Partner marketing needs vary hugely. You want to support each partner’s individual marketing needs, but lack the insights and resources to do it. [cluster 1 link]
- Hidden revenue in your channel. You know some partners have huge growth potential, but you don’t have the data or insights to find or prioritise them. [cluster 2 link]
- MDF money has to generate a return. Better ROI from your MDF money feels impossible with siloed funding, performance, and data. [cluster 3 link]
- Endless underperforming assets. You want to deliver the exact content partners need to sell more, but can’t tell which assets perform or what’s missing. [cluster 4 link]
Each section below tackles one of these, with direct insight from the partner marketers and a clear takeaway.
Channel partner segmentation: why “equal support” creates unequal outcomes
The biggest challenge in channel partner segmentation isn’t effort or intent. It’s variation. Every partner has different marketing needs, maturity levels, and growth trajectories. But most programmes still operate on “fairness equals sameness,” giving everyone the same campaigns, content, and cadence.
Aristotle said it better than any of us could: “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
Treating everyone the same is operationally convenient, but commercially limiting. High performers skim past generic materials because they’re already beyond them. Mid-tier partners get overwhelmed by content that doesn’t match where they are. And low-engagement partners fall further behind because nobody’s meeting them at their level.
The data backs this up. 4 out of 5 new partners fail to generate sales in their first year . That’s not because those partners are bad. It’s because most onboarding treats every new partner identically, regardless of their marketing capability or readiness.
Michelle Collen at ServiceNow described how they’re tackling this head-on. “ServiceNow’s Partner Program is designed to move away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach by offering tiered segmentation and tailored enablement. Partners are classified into levels such as Registered, Specialist, Premier, Elite, and Global Elite, as well as by motion: Reseller, Service Provider, Consulting & Implementation, Build. This segmentation ensures partners receive enablement aligned to their maturity, capabilities, and strategic priorities rather than generic HUB resources.”
Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, reinforced the communication side of this. His research shows the vast majority of channel partners struggle with vendor-provided communications. The fix, he argues, is communication at the right cadence: focused, relevant, personalised, and hyper-local. Vendors who do this drive deeper engagement and stronger co-sell outcomes. Vendors who blast generic updates wonder why nobody reads them.
We see this pattern constantly across the Microsoft partner ecosystem. The programmes that grow revenue are the ones that match support to where each partner actually is, not the ones that tick the “sent the newsletter” box.
That gap between what partners get and what they actually need is where most revenue is lost.
The takeaway: Channel partner segmentation isn’t about tiers on a slide deck. It’s about matching your support, content, and communication to where each partner actually is in their journey. If your top partners and your newest partners are getting the same materials, you’re losing revenue on both ends.
The partner sourced revenue you can’t see yet
Most partner programmes know exactly who their top performers are. That’s the easy part. The 80/20 rule dominates channel thinking. 80% of channel-sourced revenue comes from just 20% of partners .
But who are your next top performers? That’s where the partner sourced revenue really hides.
Most systems only track who transacts. They tell you who sold something last quarter. They don’t tell you which partners are gaining momentum, shifting focus, influencing pipeline, or expanding into new markets. That means high-potential partners stay invisible until after a competitor has already picked them up.
As Gemma Telford, Founder of Archer Agency, put it: “80% of your partners generate zero revenue (let’s be honest, it’s probably even higher than that).” That’s not just a problem. It’s an enormous untapped opportunity sitting in the long tail of your channel.
Amy Roberts, EMEA Principal at PartnerPath, advocates a data-driven approach: “Monitor progress and analyse trends within the data… track partner-sourced leads and their close rates to understand where you can make positive changes.” She’s right. But most programmes lack the infrastructure to do this at any meaningful scale.
Wayne Gretzky’s old line applies perfectly here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” If you’re only looking at last quarter’s revenue numbers, you’re skating to where the puck was.
This is exactly why we built the Partner Benchmarking Tool for Microsoft . The question that sparked it was simple: which partners are actually improving, and which are standing still? The tool analyses data from thousands of companies and tens of thousands of channels, running 40+ tests across content types, SEO signals, and engagement metrics. It’s helped 10,000+ partners globally and analysed over $10M in marketing development funds.
The whole point wasn’t to rank partners on a leaderboard. It was to surface the signals that reveal who’s growing, before it becomes obvious to everyone else. Partners gaining momentum, shifting focus, expanding into new markets. That’s where the hidden revenue lives.
The takeaway: Stop only looking at who’s selling right now. Start building systems that show you who’s about to. The partner sourced revenue you can’t see today is the growth you’ll miss tomorrow.
The market development funds ROI problem: big budgets, no signal
MDF is one of the biggest line items in most channel budgets, and one of the hardest to defend.
John Wanamaker said it over a century ago: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” For most partner programmes, that ratio is worse.
Here’s how it typically works. Vendors treat MDF like a grant: proposal forms, subjective approvals, and spend that’s only reviewed after the money’s gone. High-performing partners go underfunded because the allocation process doesn’t account for potential. Low-impact partners absorb budget because the approval criteria are vague. And nobody can clearly prove market development funds ROI because the data lives in silos that were never designed to talk to each other.
60% of MDF goes unclaimed annually . More than half the budget allocated to grow partner revenue never gets spent.
And it’s not just the unclaimed money that’s the problem. The Channel Marketing Association’s 2025 State of Channel Marketing Report found that nearly 9 in 10 respondents say their ability to measure channel marketing effectiveness still needs improvement. The money goes out. The data doesn’t come back.
Telford was blunt about it: “You can’t prove ROI from partners.” And Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, sees the pressure mounting: “Partner teams are being measured and compensated on partner contribution… Management needs data to justify the continued investment.”
Rick Flores, Founder of Partner GTM Institute, offers a useful reframe: “MDF is an investment in growth, not a guaranteed return.” He’s right, but that only works if you have the signals to tell you which investments are growing and which are just spending.
The real issue isn’t fraud or admin. It’s misallocation. Without signal-led insight into which partners can actually convert capital into revenue, MDF becomes scattershot spend instead of strategic investment.
This was the exact problem that came up in conversations with Microsoft’s Partner Marketing teams during visits to Seattle. How do you prove ROI on millions in marketing development funds given to partners globally? Those conversations led directly to building the Partner Benchmarking Tool . A platform that could, for the first time, objectively assess whether giving marketing funds to a partner resulted in better outcomes.
As Jennifer Tomlinson, Global Channel Marketing Leader at Microsoft, put it: “Fifty Five and Five have developed an AI marketing platform that totally changes the game when it comes to understanding our financial investment in partners.”
The takeaway: MDF needs to move from a discretionary grant to a signal-led investment. That means building the infrastructure to track what happens after the money goes out, not just whether the money went out.
Struggling to prove partner marketing ROI?
We build tools that give sales and marketing teams the signals they need to find hidden revenue and stop wasting budget.
Talk to usPartner marketing best practices mean nothing when 80% of your content is invisible
A huge chunk of your partner enablement library probably never gets used. You pour budget into decks, playbooks, training paths, and portal assets, yet most of it sits idle, buried in folders partners never open.
The numbers confirm what most partner marketers quietly suspect. Forrester puts it at 65% of marketing content going unused . Most partner marketers we talk to say it’s closer to 80%. Either way, in the channel that’s not just a content problem. It represents stranded capital and millions in potential revenue sitting unused across your partner network.
The problem isn’t that the content is bad. It’s that partners don’t have the marketing muscle to activate raw content. They get lost in complex onboarding portals. They treat you as just another logo in a crowded vendor line-up. The result: an impressive-looking library with very little connection to pipeline.
Telford sees it from the partner side: “Partners don’t care about your corporate messaging… They definitely don’t want another partner portal.” That should be a wake-up call for anyone about to commission another batch of “partner-ready” assets without asking whether the existing ones are actually being used.
McBain sees this as a communication problem at its core: “80% of channel partners are challenged with vendor-provided communications. In today’s platform-led era, communication isn’t a ’nice to have’, it’s a competitive advantage.” His point: vendors who deliver timely, relevant, and personalised messaging win. Vendors who dump content into a portal and hope for the best don’t.
BuzzFeed’s Jonathan Perelman nailed the broader principle: “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.” You can have the best partner marketing content in your industry, but if your partners can’t find it, can’t use it, or don’t know it exists, it’s generating zero pipeline.
Michelle Collen described how ServiceNow approaches this differently: “Content analytics and feedback loops embedded in the Partner Portal to track usage and retire outdated assets. Dynamic enablement: regular updates to PLAs and specialisations ensure content reflects current market needs and partner capabilities.” The key words there are analytics, feedback loops, and retire. They’re not just creating content. They’re measuring what works and killing what doesn’t.
The real opportunity isn’t to create more content. It’s to audit what you’ve already built, identify the few assets that actually move deals, and redeploy them intelligently into partner workflows, so existing content starts earning again instead of gathering digital dust.
The takeaway: The best partner marketing best practices start with what you already have. Stop building more. Start making what works findable, usable, and measurable. Everything else is inventory, not investment.
What this all comes down to
How do you grow channel partner revenue? Not with one big fix. Not with a new portal. Not with another generic enablement kit.
You grow it by getting four things right that most programmes get wrong:
- Segment your partners by maturity and intent, not by tier alone. Match your support to where each partner actually is, not where your programme says they should be.
- Look for your next top performers, not just your current ones. Build systems that surface the signals of growth before competitors spot them.
- Move MDF from discretionary spending to signal-led investment. Track what happens after the money goes out, not just whether it went out.
- Stop creating content. Start deploying the content that works. Audit, measure, and redeploy. Don’t just add to the pile.
Every partner marketer I spoke to for this piece said some version of the same thing: the data exists, the tools exist, the opportunity is enormous. What’s usually missing is the infrastructure to connect them.
That’s what we build at Fifty Five and Five : tools that give sales and marketing teams the signals they need to find hidden revenue, prove ROI, and stop wasting budget on things that don’t convert.
If any of these four problems sound familiar, I’d like to hear about it.
*Chris Wright is the founder of Fifty Five and Five, an AI-powered B2B marketing agency that builds tools across the full revenue cycle.*
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