This recently came up in the Partner Marketing Leaders community. Marie Roland, one of our Ambassadors, asked how everyone approaches co-marketing with reseller partners, from choosing the right partners, to measuring whether it worked.
The responses were good. But one pattern came through clearly: most teams focus their energy on the campaign itself and underinvest in two things that determine whether the campaign delivers. Teams build the event, run the webinar, create the content, then end up with great partner engagement and zero attribution.
Pascale, EVP of Strategy at Sherpa, pulled together her thoughts below:
We run so many co-marketing activities across so many regions and in lots of different verticals. And there’s definitely some commonality I can share: We broadly bucket success in co-marketing into 3 buckets: The tactical activity, Partner Engagement and Partner Enablement. Scoring low on any of those three - and there will be ROI leaking.
Let’s talk about the tactical activity first, this, for us, really depends on the market and the solution. Competitive markets with long marketing and sales cycles, high value sales, large buying groups needs a different set of tactics than fast sales, non-competitive solutions. Nevertheless whether it’s ABM, events, content marketing - the tactical activity needs to match the marketing maturity of the Partner and there’s where Partner selection becomes really important (e.g. a partner with no marketing automation will not do well with top of funnel content marketing alone).
"Our research shows that over 40% of the outcome of partner marketing is solely based on the partner selection."
Pascale Smith, EVP Strategy, Sherpa
Partner engagement within the process is key, you need them actively involved; making decisions, bringing the right stakeholders, adding to the story. It builds understanding but also builds accountability. When leads come in, you need the Partners to be engaged so that they act on those leads and feel bought-in to that success. Partner marketing “for” Partners, where you just hand over leads and hope for the best has none of the Partner engagement and whilst sometimes successful, we’ve often seen it fail. We would normally recommend a level of structured support (we call it concierge) to take Partners on the journey in active involvement.
Partner enablement and marketing enablement really, is one where we want Partner marketing and sales to be able to truly tell the story of joint value. We think the best enablement when paired with engagement is crafting the joint value proposition which isn’t just used at the top of the funnel but all the way through the marketing and sales process. So often we have a silo between marketing and sales and it makes campaigns really leaky. Having a joint value proposition that everyone gets behind and is crafted for each stage (within the marketing outreach, within the sales material) is the best bang-for-buck for enablement that we’ve seen and is universal regardless of the tactical activity.
"The best enablement when paired with engagement is crafting the joint value proposition, not just at the top of the funnel but all the way through the marketing and sales process."
Pascale Smith, EVP Strategy, Sherpa
The three buckets don't work in isolation. Getting the tactics right while neglecting partner engagement means leads land with no one to act on them. Investing in enablement without the right partner selection means the best messaging lands with the wrong audience. Each one reinforces the others, and a gap in any of them is where ROI quietly walks out the door.
What this also means is that co-marketing is genuinely difficult to do well at scale. Most teams are stretched, partners have varying levels of marketing maturity, and the path from campaign to attributed revenue is rarely clean. Having someone to guide partners through the process, whether that's through structured concierge support, a clear joint value proposition framework, or simply knowing which partners to prioritise, makes a material difference to what comes out the other side.
If this resonates, we'd love to hear how you're approaching co-marketing in your organisation. Marie's thread is live in the Partner Marketing Leaders community, jump in, share what's working (and what isn't), and learn from practitioners who are working through the same challenges.
And if you're working through this at scale and want a team that's done it across regions and verticals, that's exactly what we do at Sherpa. Get in touch, we're happy to talk through where the leaks are and what it would take to fix them.