Ask most partners whether their marketing is working and you'll get one of two answers.
"Yeah, pretty well, I think." Or a slightly defensive "well, it's hard to measure, isn't it."
Both mean the same thing: nobody's checked properly.
This is a guide to checking properly. It's not a scorecard you fill in and file - it's a set of questions with honest answers attached, and a rough idea of what to do when the answer's uncomfortable.
Set aside an hour. Get whoever owns marketing in the room, and whoever owns sales, because half of these questions can't be answered without both.
Part one: does anyone actually know what it's for?
Question 1: What number is marketing trying to move?
If the answer is "brand awareness" or "more leads", the strategy isn't working - because neither of those is a number you can be wrong about.
A working strategy has something specific behind it. Twelve new customers in manufacturing. £400k of new pipeline into the security practice. Three co-sell opportunities a quarter with Microsoft's account teams.
You want a target you could genuinely miss. If you can't miss it, you can't hit it either.
If this one's a struggle: stop everything else and fix it first. Every other question in this guide depends on it.
Question 2: Could you describe your target customer to a stranger in thirty seconds?
Not "SMEs in the UK". That's an address, not an audience.
Who are they, what's going wrong in their world right now, what have they already tried, and who else is in the room when they decide? If you can't answer that, your content is being written for a shape, not a person - and it'll read that way. It's the work behind audience-led messaging.
Question 3: Does everyone give the same answer to "what do you do"?
Ask three people in your business separately. Sales, delivery, and whoever wrote the website.
If you get three different answers, that's not a communications problem to paper over with a messaging doc - it's a genuine lack of agreement about what the business is. Marketing can't fix that from the outside, and it'll leak into everything until it's sorted.
Part two: the differentiation test
Question 4: The logo test
Print your homepage. Print three competitors' homepages. Cover the logos.
Can anyone in your team tell which is yours?
Most partners fail this, and it's not because they're bad at what they do. It's because the safe language wins every internal review. Trusted. Experienced. End-to-end. Customer-first. Nobody ever got in trouble for signing that off, and nobody ever won a deal because of it either.
What good looks like: something a competitor genuinely couldn't say. A named sector you know inside out. A way of working nobody else offers. A guarantee with teeth. A number. That's the output of proper value proposition development.
Question 5: What do your customers say about you on a reference call?
Go and ask. Genuinely - ring three of them.
The phrase they keep reaching for is usually far better than anything written in a workshop, and it's evidenced by the fact they said it unprompted. Most partners have their best positioning sitting in their own customer base, unused.
Question 6: Would a Microsoft seller repeat your pitch?
Microsoft's sellers and account teams have hundreds of partners to remember. They'll remember the ones with a sharp, specific, easy-to-repeat story - and forget the ones who sound like everyone else.
If you can't reduce what you do to a sentence a busy seller could repeat accurately in a customer meeting, that's a straightforward gap and one of the higher-value ones to close. It's most of what marketing into Microsoft is really about.
Part three: is the activity any good?
Question 7: What happened to your last campaign?
Not the metrics. The outcome.
How many conversations came from it? How many became opportunities? How many closed, or are still live? What did it cost, all in, including your team's time?
If nobody can answer that, you don't have a measurement problem - you have a "nobody was tracking it" problem, which is easier to fix than it feels. Start tracking the next one properly from day one.
Question 8: Are you confusing output with progress?
Twelve blogs, four case studies and a webinar is a lot of work. It's also completely possible to do all of that and move nothing.
Busy is not the same as well directed.
Look at the last quarter's output and put each item into one of two piles: this existed to move a specific buyer forward, and this existed because the calendar said so. If the second pile's bigger, that's your answer.
Question 9: What happens in the ninety seconds after a lead lands?
This is where an enormous amount of partner marketing money dies.
Who gets the notification? How fast do they respond? Is there a follow-up sequence, or does it depend on whether that person's having a busy week?
Fix this before you spend another penny on generating leads. More leads into a broken follow-up process is just a bigger pile of ignored enquiries.
Question 10: What are you doing for the people who aren't ready yet?
Most of your future customers aren't buying this quarter. If your marketing only speaks to people with a live requirement, you're fishing in about five per cent of your market and ignoring the rest.
Nurture is dull, cheap and disproportionately effective. It's also the first thing to get dropped when things get busy.
Part four: the money and the machine
Question 11: Are you using what Microsoft gives you?
Co-op and MDF funding, partner-to-partner routes, co-sell, the marketing assets and campaign-in-a-box material.
Plenty of partners either don't claim what's available, or claim it and spend it on something generic because the deadline's close. Both are waste - and the second one's worse, because it produces activity that looks like a strategy.
Worth checking: what's available to you this fiscal year, what the deadlines are, and whether the thing you're planning to spend it on is something you'd have paid for yourself. That last question is the honest test. The Microsoft Co-op Funds Hub covers the current rules.
Question 12: Are you buying capability or dependency?
If your agency vanished tomorrow, what would you still have?
The messaging framework, the audience research, the campaign playbook, the reporting structure - or a folder of finished artwork and no idea how any of it was decided?
Both models are legitimate. But you should know which one you're paying for, and dependency should cost less, not more.
Question 13: Would you spend your own money on it?
The final question, and the most useful one.
Go through the last twelve months of marketing spend, line by line, and mark each item: yes, I'd pay for that again, or no.
Whatever's in the "no" pile is your budget for next year's better ideas.
Scoring it honestly
You don't need a points system. Just count how many of those thirteen you answered confidently, with evidence, and without hedging.
Ten or more
- your strategy's working. Go deeper rather than broader: double down on what's producing and stop apologising for cutting the rest.
Six to nine
- the activity's probably fine, the direction isn't. Usually a positioning and prioritisation job, not a "do more" job.
Five or fewer
- stop. Don't commission anything new. Get the proposition and the target number sorted first, because everything you build on top of a muddled proposition just spreads the muddle wider.
The one thing to take away
Marketing that isn't working rarely looks broken. It looks busy.
There's activity, there are reports, there's a calendar with things in it. That's exactly why it survives so long unchallenged - nothing's obviously on fire.
The check is simple, even if the answers aren't: did this quarter's marketing make more of the right people want to talk to us? If you can't say yes with a straight face, it's time to change something.
Been through this and don't love the answers? Happy to talk it through - fifteen minutes, no obligation, no sales pitch.
Nathan, Founder & CEO, Resultful