Partner Marketing Leaders Community Update April

Partner Marketing Leaders Community Update 

 A quick round-up of what’s coming up and what you may have missed in the community. 

1) Upcoming: ABM in Partner Marketing – Ambassador Panel Discussion  

Thursday, May 21
11:00 PM – 11:45 PM CST

Account-based marketing is one of the most talked-about strategies in B2B. In partner marketing, it comes with a different level of complexity.

How do you align ABM with partner motions? How do you run joint campaigns when partners have different priorities, different data, and different definitions of success?

This Ambassador panel brings together experienced partner marketing leaders to share what’s working in practice.

What you’ll hear:

• How to align ABM strategies across vendor and partner teams
• What effective joint ABM campaigns look like
• Lessons learned from real execution, including what teams would do differently

Your panellists:

Katrina Sadova, Partner Marketing Manager, Intel. Katrina brings 20 years of experience across marketing and finance. She leads partner programmes and ecosystem strategy across EMEA, with a focus on co-marketing and driving measurable partner revenue.

Yash Aggarwal, Partner Marketing Manager, Canonical. Yash has built and delivered co-marketing programmes with strong commercial impact, including campaigns achieving a 1:20 ROI. His experience spans ABM, webinars, paid media, and content-led campaigns.

This will be a practical, peer-led discussion focused on how to make ABM work in a partner context.

Register here >

2) On-Demand: MDF Unlocked – Key Takeaways & Recording    

If you missed our recent Ambassador panel on MDF, the full session is now available on demand, along with a summary of the key insights.

This was one of the most engaged conversations we’ve had as a community, focused on a topic that continues to challenge partner marketing teams.

Key takeaways from the session:

• Start with a framework, not the budget. Define what success looks like in pipeline terms before launching any activity.
• MDF underutilisation is a planning problem. If partners haven’t budgeted their share, funds don’t get used.
• Shift from allocation to investment. Leading teams treat MDF like a portfolio. They test, learn, and scale what works.
• Pooling MDF unlocks bigger opportunities. Combined investment increases reach, impact, and joint value.
• Structure drives performance. Clear rules, measurement, and alignment reduce friction and improve outcomes.

3) Community Round-up   

April was a busy month. We hosted one of our most-discussed webinars of the year, our community threads sparked some genuinely useful debate, and our ambassadors showed up in force, both on stage and in the comments.

A huge thank you to Nathalie Gandolfo, Marion Olsen, and Varvara Sokrut for joining the MDF panel, to Pascale Smith, EVP Strategy at Sherpa, for bringing her expertise to the co-marketing discussion, and to Marie Roland for both hosting the AI roundtable and kicking off one of the best threads we’ve had all year.

MDF unlocked: watch on demand

Our MDF panel with Nathalie, Marion, and Varvara is now available on demand. If you missed it live, it’s worth your time. The three of them covered the practical realities of MDF: how to structure it, how to defend it, and how to make it work for partners rather than just for the spreadsheet.

You can review the key takeaways and watch it on demand here >

The co-marketing thread worth bookmarking

Marie Roland opened up a conversation about co-marketing campaign planning that quickly became one of the most practical threads we’ve seen in the community. She laid out the real complexity: choosing the right partners, aligning on goals upfront, keeping partners actively involved rather than just included, and then actually measuring whether it worked.

The responses were excellent. Pascale Smith shared a framework she uses at Sherpa, bucketing co-marketing success into three areas: the tactical activity, partner engagement, and partner enablement. Her point that over 40% of the outcome of partner marketing comes down to partner selection alone is one of those figures that stops you in your tracks.

Yash Aggarwal added something that resonated with a lot of people: with larger partners, specific asks go further than general ones. Finding the right contact whose goals align with yours, rather than relying on broad asks into big organisations, is often what actually moves things forward.

One community member put it plainly: most teams are still stitching together UTMs, CRM data, and spreadsheets to prove co-marketing worked. Attribution remains the biggest unsolved problem in partner marketing, and the thread didn’t pretend otherwise.

Why partner marketing keeps losing the budget argument

A thread on field marketing versus partner marketing surfaced something a lot of us have experienced firsthand. Field marketing tends to win budget battles because it maps neatly to pipeline and revenue in the CRM. Partner marketing drives pipeline through relationships that accelerate deals, but that influence is harder to capture, so it often shows up as “indirect” while field gets the credit.

Marion Olsen framed it well: field marketing feels like direct attribution, like instant gratification. One member shared that in 2024 and 2025 she wasn’t allocated any partner marketing budget at all. Her goal was to draw investment from partners and other internal teams instead. It’s a dynamic a lot of partner marketers will recognise.

The thread didn’t resolve it, because nothing does yet. But the conversation was honest about where the problem actually sits: attribution systems are built for transactions, not relationships. Visibility comes from being close to how deals actually progress, not from waiting for the data to catch up.

AI in partner marketing: the roundtable happened

Marie Roland brought together a small group of partner marketers at the end of April to talk honestly about how they’re using AI in their day-to-day work. Real use cases, what’s working, what isn’t, and where people are still figuring it out. The conversation was exactly the kind of peer exchange this community does well.

We’ll be sharing the key takeaways soon, so keep an eye out in the community!

Want in on conversations like these?

This is what the PML community looks like every month: practitioners sharing what’s actually working, debating the hard problems, and building something useful together. If you’re not already a member, come and join us.

https://partner-marketing-leaders.circle.so/c/getting-started/