If you look at your partner portal analytics right now, you might see a depressing trend. You likely have a spike of activity when a new Value Added Reseller (VAR) signs up, followed by months of silence. You have spent thousands of dollars and countless hours building a repository of slick PDFs, high-resolution logos, and email templates, yet your partners rarely download them. It is easy to blame the partners. You might lament that the channel is “lazy” or that they just “don’t get marketing.”
I can tell you from my years as a VAR (and interviewing countless others) that laziness is rarely the reason. The issue is bandwidth. A typical VAR is juggling technical support tickets, hardware deployments, and payroll. They don’t have a dedicated CMO. When an ISV sends them a link to a portal and says “good luck,” that ISV is adding a chore to their to-do list rather than solving a problem. To fix this, you have to stop viewing co-marketing as a self-service library and start treating it as a product you need to sell to your partners.
The difference between providing assets and providing answers
Most software vendors make the mistake of providing raw ingredients when their partners are hungry for a fully-baked cake. You might upload a white paper about your new API integration or a technical spec sheet about your latest security patch. While these are useful for a sales engineer, they are useless for a partner trying to generate leads. Your partners do not need more technical specs. They need a reason for their customers to buy.
Effective co-marketing means doing the heavy lifting before the partner even logs in. Instead of a folder full of logos, provide a “Campaign in a Box.” This should include a pre-written email sequence (where they only need to insert their company name), social media graphics with the captions already written, and a call script for their sales reps. If you want your partners to market your software, you must reduce the friction to near zero.
Removing the friction from market development funds
Market Development Funds (MDF) are theoretically the fuel for channel growth, but in practice, they are often a source of frustration. Many ISVs design MDF programs to protect themselves from misuse (a valid concern), but they end up creating so much red tape that partners simply give up. If a partner has to fill out a three-page form, submit a marketing plan, and wait six weeks for approval just to get $500 for a local lunch-and-learn event, they won’t bother.
You should consider streamlining your MDF for smaller activities. Trust is the currency of the channel. Try creating a fast-track approval for standard activities like email blasts or local trade show booths. Better yet, instead of giving them cash and asking for receipts, offer to pay for the marketing services directly. If you have a preferred vendor for direct mail or digital ads, allow your partners to use their MDF credits with that vendor. This ensures the money is spent correctly and removes the administrative burden of reimbursement from your partner’s back office.
The power of the concierge marketing approach
The most successful ISVs I have spoken to do not wait for partners to come to the portal. They take a concierge approach. This involves your channel manager sitting down with a partner (quarterly or annually) and mapping out a joint marketing calendar. It is not enough to say “let’s market together.” You need to say “let’s run a webinar on inventory management in October.”
When you co-host a webinar or co-write a case study, you are providing validation that the partner cannot generate on their own. You are the expert on the software; they are the expert on the local implementation. When you combine those two voices, the marketing becomes authentic and authoritative. This requires more effort from your team than simply uploading a PDF to a portal, but the ROI is significantly higher. You stop being a vendor they buy from and become a partner they rely on. That is the stickiness that builds a resilient channel and revenue growth.
