The Future of Partner Marketing: On-demand and Key Takeaways

Executive Summary

This is the key takeaways document from The future of partner marketing, the 11th session in six years in our Partner Marketing Leaders webinar series. Tom Perry, CEO of The Sherpa Group, introduced the panel at the start.

“I’m joined today by two exceptional panelists. I’m delighted to introduce Aimee Catalano, Managing Director of Global Partner Marketing at Google Cloud, who runs partner marketing at some scale in one of the biggest ecosystems in the world. We’re also joined, for the 11th time, by Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia, who sees the whole market and will keep us honest with the data. So we have a hyperscaler, an analyst and a practitioner, and hopefully that’s a great mix for everybody.”

Tom Perry, CEO, The Sherpa Group

Meet the panel

Aimee Catalano
Managing Director, Global Partner Marketing, Google

SPEAKER · 02

Jay McBain
Chief Analyst, Omdia

 

 

 

 

 

SPEAKER · 03

Tom Perry
CEO (host and panelist), The Sherpa Group

 

Blueprint for success in 2027

1. The first marketing moments decide who’s in the deal

Partners are now part of nearly every deal, so the question for partner marketers is which moments in the customer journey they show up for. Tom opened with the figure that 96% of IT deals are influenced by partners. Omdia’s Jay McBain added that customers now use an average of 6.3 partners per deal, and that the first 10 to 12 of the 28 moments he tracks are marketing moments.

Trust is earned in those early moments, and Jay framed it as a question of who gets the seat at the table:

“In this world of these early marketing moments, who earns that trust with the customer? Who earns that spot in the boardroom where you’re holding a pen and drawing a topology on the wall with edge to cloud and how it’s all gonna play out for the customer? These early moments are everything for these companies.”
Jay McBain, Chief Analyst, Omdia

At Google Cloud, Aimee said the 100% partner attach strategy runs from the top of the company to the bottom. She credited the partner ecosystem for Google Cloud’s growth of more than 100% year over year.

2. Assess partner capability before you commit budget

Tom’s partner marketing agency, Sherpa, has built a partner assessment platform, EdisonAI, that assesses 20,000 partners every year for its benchmark. It covers marketing infrastructure, staffing, skills and alignment with the vendors they work for. He calls the gap they find the missing multiplier. One finding is that 70% of partners don’t have CRM and marketing automation. When a good-quality lead goes to a partner who’s engaged and enabled, Tom said around 85% of those leads reach an outcome of some kind.

“You can have the best story in the world, but you need to work with the partners who are tooled and geared correctly to get that story into the markets that they specialize in.”
Tom Perry, CEO, The Sherpa Group

Jay looked at the same problem from the customer side. Talent is the number one thing customers say slows their AI projects, and Omdia found that 82% of partners aren’t fully ready to grow in AI services. Google responded with a $750 million partner enablement investment. Jay noted that this isn’t MDF or an incentive check. It’s money to close the skills gap so partners can talk to customers by industry, role, geography and outcome.

Aimee explained Google Cloud’s thinking with the image of a stool. There’s no sense investing heavily in marketing if sales isn’t enabled, and no sense selling if your practitioners can’t deliver.

3. AI makes narrow marketing affordable

Aimee sees hyper-specialization as the biggest opportunity for partner marketers right now. Hyperscalers like Google and the AI companies will never be experts in every micro-industry. They do now provide the platforms and connectors that partners can build on for a specific group of customers. She pointed to Google’s recent Gemini offerings for legal and financial services as an example.

Jay’s example was dry cleaners with three to 10 locations in Vancouver. His team at Omdia tracks 1,012 industries. Google can’t create that level of granularity itself, but the AI layer can. Aimee’s advice was to find product and market fit first, then put your best people on the first five customers so they become references, and only then scale. She also described a joint offer from an ISV, a services partner and a vendor. In her view, that combination could double the investment any one of them would make alone.

ABM is where the cost change is easiest to see. Aimee said an ABM program used to cost around $50,000 and was reserved for the top of the market. AI agents now make it realistic for a whole segment. Tom’s team started partner ABM in 2018 with eight large partners because the tooling didn’t exist. He expects many more partners to get the same treatment within a year.

On AI more broadly, Tom said content is table stakes and AI slop is a process problem you can fix. He sees the bigger gains elsewhere: deciding which partners get money, improving reporting, and helping partners progress each lead with its own context instead of receiving a CSV.

For anyone worried about keeping up, Jay’s advice was this:

“Being on the front end of this doesn’t mean being an expert or perfect, it just means being better, 10% better than your competitors.”Jay McBain, Chief Analyst, Omdia

4. The funnel is now an hourglass, and MDF hasn’t caught up

Aimee said Google Cloud’s sales teams used to see marketing’s job as getting them deals and pipeline. Over roughly the last six months, the focus has moved to cross-sell, upsell and usage, and Google is now putting a lot of emphasis on the bottom half of the funnel.

“The marketing funnel is not a funnel anymore, it’s an hourglass. You have the awareness, the demand, you get a customer, and then you start the next phase of how do you then grow that. Whether it’s your in-product growth mechanisms, or even the communities, where they’re learning from one another and expanding your usage because they’re learning from their peers.”
Aimee Catalano, Managing Director, Global Partner Marketing, Google Cloud

Jay explained the change. Two-thirds of the roughly $6 trillion industry is now subscription or consumption and moving toward tokens, so winning a customer often means winning the first 30 days. Deals that were once a million dollars are now closer to $50,000, which puts the weight on upsell and cross-sell. Many of these moments are also becoming agentic, so the next handoff may be to an agent rather than a person. He pointed to Wall Street picking through Google’s earnings for its 108% renewal number, because that’s the customer for life.

MDF hasn’t kept pace. With 6.3 partners around the table, Jay said, at best one collects the money that triggers MDF. The other 5.3 partners doing advisory, design, implementation and managed services never see it. More than 1,000 vendors have also moved to point systems, so the money still exists but doesn’t arrive labeled as MDF. Google Marketplace, which Jay said has grown at 82% compounded for five years, adds another route where none of the 6.3 partners may collect the money that triggers MDF.

Tom’s issue is with the model itself. MDF is still quarterly, reactive and pre-approved, and a good number of vendors still reward only the initial partner. That’s despite about 94% of partners saying demand generation is their number one ask from vendors. He’d like to see a vendor break rank and say “Yeah, we can do that.” Aimee said Google is spending a lot of energy on this.

5. Fix the metrics, and say what you need now

Aimee warned that some of today’s metrics push people in the wrong direction:

“What we can’t do is put metrics in place that drive the wrong decision-making or behavior. Any person that has a very hard target, whether it’s a sales rep or a field marketing manager, if your job is to source XYZ pipeline with XYZ MDF dollars, you will find a way to make that happen, no matter what. In that scenario, we have now set metrics that hurt us versus help us.”
Aimee Catalano, Managing Director, Global Partner Marketing, Google Cloud

Google’s marketing leadership team is about to spend a week on the problem. Aimee was open that Google doesn’t have the answer yet, and she hopes to have one within six months.

Dean asked a community question about measuring consideration, and Aimee answered with her personal view rather than a Google position. Alongside brand lift and perception research, she described seven levers that drive the lift, each with a hard metric behind it. Partner marketing is one of them. She acknowledged it’s volume-based and imperfect, but said pairing the two gives teams something tangible to aim at.

Her advice to partner marketers was not to wait for the quarterly survey or the partner marketing council to tell your vendor counterpart what you need. What partners want in three months isn’t what they want today. Raise it now, and bring the voice of the customer into planning.

What’s changed since last year’s blueprint

Last year’s blueprint drew on a panel with Andrew Kisslo of SAP, Jay McBain and Tom Perry. This year Aimee Catalano of Google Cloud joined Jay and Tom. Several themes carried over, but the conversation around each has moved on.

One topic is new this year: hyper-specialization. AI now makes it practical to build for micro-industries, like Jay’s dry cleaners in Vancouver.

The 2027 blueprint in summary

1. The first marketing moments decide which partners make it into the deal.
2. Assess partner capability before you commit budget.
3. AI makes narrow, industry-specific marketing affordable.
4. The funnel is now an hourglass, and MDF hasn’t caught up.
5. Fix the metrics, and tell your vendor counterparts what you need.

Watch on-demand

The full Panel Discussion

Go further

The partner capability gap Tom described is the subject of the Missing Multiplier, the third edition of Sherpa’s Partner Marketing Benchmark. It tracked more than 20,000 partners and every lead inside a live, funded vendor demand program. It found that a partner’s engagement with the vendor and their ability to act once a lead arrives matter more than the tactic. Partners strong on both progressed 85% of funded leads, and partners strong on only one progressed under 17%.

Download the Missing Multiplier

Aimee’s point about metrics shows up in the numbers too. In the 2027 Channel Marketing Survey Report, 89% of partner marketing leaders still name partner-led pipeline their top priority, but 76% can’t yet prove what’s driving it, and measurement and attribution are now the top blocker.

Read the 2027 Channel Marketing Survey Report

Keep the conversation going

Partner Marketing Leaders is a community for partner and channel marketers. Get the details on the next session, share what’s working, and meet your peers. Join us at https://partner-marketing-leaders.circle.so/c/getting-started/welcome-to-partner-marketing-leaders