Microsoft partner marketing: too much activity, too little proof

Microsoft partners in the UK and Ireland are busy with marketing and struggling to say what it earns them. That is one of the main findings of Microsoft Partner Marketing, Measured, a report from Resultful, a marketing agency that works for Microsoft partners, which IT Europa reported on 28 September. It lands after Microsoft changed what its Co-op marketing funds reward, and that change makes the measurement gap a revenue problem, not a reporting one.

The research was commissioned by Resultful, which sells marketing services to the partners it surveyed, and carried out by Censuswide among 250 sales, marketing and business leaders at UK and Ireland Microsoft partners. The report’s landing page gives no fieldwork dates. A US edition covering 251 partners is due in early October.

The activity is not in doubt. The average partner already runs nine of the 20 marketing activities the study listed and plans to add another eight in the next 12 months, the landing page says. Yet marketing a partner generated itself accounted for 22.1% of new business on average, according to Resultful, while Microsoft referrals and distributor or vendor leads together brought in 35.1%. Only 47.2% of partners run basic marketing reporting and 43.6% run attribution that links an activity to a deal. IT Europa reports that 49% either cannot connect marketing to pipeline and revenue or are unsure whether they can.

That gap was easier to live with while so much of the activity ran on vendor money. Resultful says Microsoft has moved Co-op away from rewarding retention and toward rewarding growth. The argument here is simple: a partner that cannot show what its marketing produces will find it harder to show the growth the funding now follows. The answer is fewer activities, measured properly and paid for by the partner itself.

Whose money it is

More partners fund marketing with somebody else’s money than their own. In the survey, 46% said they use Microsoft Co-op, 44.4% distributor-funded activity and 41.2% Microsoft market development funds (MDF), against 37.2% who fund it from their own profit and loss account, Resultful reports.

That dependence shows when the money is taken away. Resultful asked the 175 partners whose marketing is funded by Co-op or MDF what would happen if Microsoft funding were withdrawn entirely. Six in 10 (60.6%) said their marketing would stop or reduce, and 14.9% said it would stop almost completely. The other 39.4% said it would carry on or even increase.

Nathan Selby, founder and CEO of Resultful, called the Co-op change “a bit of a sit-up-and-listen moment” for many partners who rely on funding but do little to show growth, in comments quoted by IT Europa. The survey also suggests money is not the main constraint: the complexity of funding rules was the most-cited limit on partners’ marketing, chosen by 31.2%, while budget came eighth of 10 at 19.2%.

The boardroom and the marketing desk disagree

The sharpest finding is about who believes the marketing is working. According to IT Europa’s report of the study, 75% of business owners said they could measure marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue, compared with 35% of heads of marketing. On value, 64% of owners said they were getting good value from marketing, against 40% of marketing heads.

The two sides do not even agree on the input. Managing directors in the study put marketing investment at 4.49% of revenue on average, while heads of marketing put it at 2.93%, according to Resultful. That is a gap of more than one and a half percentage points on a question of fact.

One reading is that owners see activity while the people running marketing see how little of it they can attribute. Co-op tied to growth will test which of them is right. A partner that finds out at claim time has found out too late.

Measure first, then spend

The next claim deadline is four and a half months away. Resultful’s write-up of Microsoft’s FY27 Co-op guidelines, published on 2 September, says Co-op earned from January to June 2026 must be claimed by 15 February 2027, and that late claims are forfeited rather than rolled over. It also says several activities have been merged or dropped, so a plan carried over from last year may no longer qualify.

Three steps follow for any Microsoft partner. First, agree one marketing investment figure between the managing director and whoever runs marketing, because a board and a marketer who start from different numbers will not agree on returns. Second, pick the two or three activities that plausibly create pipeline and put attribution on them before adding anything new to a list that already runs to nine. Third, put a line for marketing in the partner’s own profit and loss account, however small, so the core continues if program criteria change again.

Selby’s own prescription is sound, and it comes from a firm that sells to the partners it surveyed. Vendor funding, he writes, “works best as an accelerator on top of your own investment, rather than as the whole engine.” Resultful says the 39.4% who would carry on without Microsoft money already have their own budget line.

Co-op was always somebody else’s money, spent on somebody else’s terms. Those terms now reward growth, and growth has to be shown. Partners that cannot show what their marketing produced should stop adding activity and start counting.