Most partner marketing hires are asked to do six jobs at once. Campaigns, content, events, web, the Microsoft relationship, and somehow the co-op claim too. That's not a role - that's a department squeezed into one salary.
So before you post another job ad, it's worth asking a blunt question: are you actually looking for a person, or are you looking for a capability?
Because the two aren't the same thing. And an agency that lives in the Microsoft partner world every day can often give you the second one faster, cheaper and with a lot less risk.
They already speak the language
Here's the bit that gets underestimated. The Microsoft ecosystem has its own dialect, and it moves.
Microsoft Commerce Incentives. Solutions Partner designations. Solution areas. Specialisations. Business Applications versus Modern Work versus Security versus Azure. Marketplace transactability. Co-sell ready. Partner attribution on customer subscriptions. The Microsoft sellers you're trying to get in front of, and whoever your Microsoft contact happens to be.
A generalist agency - even a genuinely good one - is going to need six months and a lot of your time to get fluent in that. You'll spend the first quarter explaining what a designation is and why it matters. That's a quarter of your budget going on tuition.
An agency that only works with Microsoft partners turns up already knowing. No hand-holding, no glossary, no "sorry, what does co-sell mean again?".
And it's not just vocabulary. It's knowing which levers actually move something. Knowing that a beautifully designed campaign that ignores your solution area alignment isn't going to get you very far with Microsoft. Knowing what a Microsoft seller needs to see before they'll bring you into a customer conversation - and that a glossy brochure isn't it. That's the work behind marketing into Microsoft.
Co-op and MDF: the money most partners leave sitting there
Let's talk about the funding, because this is where the maths gets interesting.
Plenty of partners accrue co-op funds and then either underclaim them or lose them entirely. Not because they're careless - because the process is fiddly. Eligible activity types, proof of execution, invoice requirements, claim windows, the guidelines that shift year to year. It's admin, and admin is what gets dropped when you're busy.
An agency that works in this space daily knows what's claimable before the work starts. That changes the shape of a campaign, because you're designing it to be fundable from day one rather than trying to retrofit a claim afterwards and hoping. The Microsoft Co-op Funds Hub walks through what qualifies.
The same goes for MDF. If you've been allocated it, there's usually a plan attached and a set of expectations about what "good" looks like. Someone who's been through that cycle dozens of times knows how to build activity that stands a real chance of being approved - and knows how to evidence it properly when the time comes.
The result? Budget you'd already earned actually gets used, and the effective cost of your marketing drops.
Specialists, not one generalist doing their best
The other thing you get is depth across functions. Think about what a decent partner marketing programme actually needs.
- Someone who can pin down the proposition and make it sound like you, not like everyone else
- A content person who can write about a technical solution without sending the reader to sleep
- A digital specialist who knows paid search, LinkedIn targeting and what a sensible cost per lead looks like in this space
- Someone who can build and maintain a website that doesn't quietly rot
- A strategist who'll tell you when the plan isn't working
You're not hiring five people for that. Nobody is. So one person ends up doing all five, brilliantly at one or two of them and adequately at the rest - and that's not a criticism of them, it's just how it goes.
With an agency you get the specialist for each bit, and only for as long as you need them. Heavy on content this quarter, heavy on events next quarter. Try flexing a permanent headcount like that. If you want to see how that's structured in practice, we set it out on our embedded marketing team page.
The unglamorous financial bit
Now the part nobody puts on a slide, but everyone feels on the P&L.
A permanent marketing hire isn't just their salary. It's employer's NI on top. Pension contributions. Annual leave you're paying for while nothing ships. Sick leave. The laptop, the software licences, the training budget, the desk if you've got an office.
Then there's the recruitment cost to get them in the door in the first place, and the gap between them starting and them actually being productive - which in a Microsoft partner business, with all that terminology to absorb, is rarely under three months.
And then there's your time. Managing someone properly means one-to-ones, objectives, appraisals, development conversations, and covering for them when they're away. If you're a director or an owner, that's your time - the most expensive hour in the business.
An agency invoice is one number. No NI, no pension, no holiday cover, no appraisal cycle, no awkward conversation if it isn't working out. If your priorities change, you change the scope. Try doing that with an employment contract.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying never hire. Plenty of partners get to a size where an in-house marketer is exactly right, and the best setups I see are a strong internal lead with an agency doing the heavy lifting around them. But hiring first, by default, before you've worked out what you actually need? That's how budget disappears.
What good actually looks like
The honest test of an agency in this space is whether they can be useful in the first conversation.
Can they tell you which designation is worth chasing and which one won't change your pipeline? Do they know what your co-op balance could realistically fund this half? Can they look at your website and tell you, plainly, why a Microsoft seller wouldn't bring you into a deal?
If they need a discovery phase to work out what Microsoft Commerce Incentives are, you're paying for their education.
You've already got enough on. The point of bringing in an agency that knows this ecosystem isn't to add another supplier to manage - it's to hand a chunk of the load to people who've done it before, and get your evenings back.
Nathan, Founder & CEO, Resultful