Are you sure your marketing team agrees with your marketing budget?

When we designed our latest Microsoft Partner market research study, we deliberately asked the same questions of business owners, managing directors, heads of sales and marketing leaders. We expected a few differences of opinion, because that's natural in any business. What we didn't expect was how far apart the boardroom and the marketing desk would be on questions of plain fact.

If you lead a Microsoft partner, this is the finding we'd most like you to read.

We asked partners what proportion of annual revenue they invest in marketing. Among business owners, 77.8% put their organisation in the 3-5% band and only 15.6% said 1-2%. Among heads of marketing, 49% said 1-2% - the largest single group - and 47.1% said 3-5%.

Convert that to an average and the gap is stark. Managing directors reported 4.49% of revenue going into marketing, while heads of marketing reported 2.93%. That's a difference of more than a point and a half, on a question of fact, asked of comparable people at comparable businesses in the same fortnight.

One of those numbers is wrong, and we can't tell you which. Are heads of marketing giving a more realistic, warts 'n all view because they're the ones who have to deliver with the budget? It's possible. Either way, there's a disconnect somewhere along the line.

The same pattern turned up again and again. 42.2% of business owners said a director or owner covers some elements of marketing alongside another role, while only 27.5% of heads of marketing described it that way. On confidence about future Microsoft incentives, 44% of owners were very confident, against 16% of heads of marketing.

The widest gap of all came on measurement. 75.6% of business owners said their business can measure marketing's contribution to pipeline and revenue. Among heads of marketing, it was 35.3% - a forty-point difference on the single most commercially important question we asked. On value, 64.4% of owners are confident they're getting good value from marketing, against 39.2% of heads of marketing.

Every time, the higher up the business you sit, the healthier the way marketing is funded and resourced looks.

There are some innocent explanations, and they're probably all partly true. Owners may be counting things the marketing lead doesn't, such as event sponsorship or salaries. Marketing leads may only be counting the discretionary budget they actually control. Vendor and distributor funding might sit in one person's view of the numbers and not the other's, which would explain a lot given how much of this market runs on Co-op and MDF.

None of those explanations is particularly comforting, though. If the board thinks it's funding marketing at 4.5% and the person running marketing is working to 2.9%, then somewhere in the middle there's a plan being built against a budget that doesn't exist. And when it underdelivers, the conversation that follows tends to be about performance, not about the gap.

If you're investing in marketing, you want that investment to land. A gap like this means the money you think you're putting in might not be reaching the people doing the work, and the confidence you feel about marketing might not be shared by the person responsible for it. That's a risk to growth, and it's one that's completely invisible from the boardroom.

This is the one thing we'd ask every partner leader to do after reading the report. Put these five questions to yourself and to whoever leads your marketing, separately and in writing, without conferring.

The value is entirely in the gaps. If your two answers to the first question are more than a percentage point apart, you've found a budgeting issue before it became a performance one, and you've found it for free. If the second question produces two different names, or no name at all, that's worth a proper conversation.

If you're thinking about investing more in marketing, and we hope you are, start by making sure you and your marketing lead agree on what's being invested today, who owns it and what it's for. Then any extra money you commit will be building on something solid.

The full role-by-role data is in Microsoft Partner Marketing, Measured - The UK Edition 2026. It takes twenty minutes to run the five questions, and we'd love to hear what you find.