Most partners don't decide to get marketing support. They drift into it, usually about six months after the point they needed it.
The pipeline's thinner than it was. The newsletter went out twice this quarter instead of six times. Somebody keeps meaning to rewrite the website. And everyone's flat out, so nobody's steering it.
Here's the thing - busy is not the same as well directed. If a few of the signs below feel a bit close to home, that's usually the moment outsourced marketing services for Microsoft partners start to earn their keep.
Marketing is somebody's fourth job
In a lot of partner businesses, marketing sits with an ops manager, a technical lead, or the founder at 10pm on a Sunday. They're capable people. They're just not marketers, and they've got a day job that pays the bills first.
The tell isn't that nothing happens. It's that the things that happen are the easy ones - a social post, a logo update, a stand at an event - while the harder work (proposition, messaging, nurture, follow-up) never gets started.
You're doing activity, not campaigns
A LinkedIn post here. A webinar there. An email that went to the whole database because segmenting it felt like too much effort.
None of that is wrong. It's just not joined-up. A campaign has a point of view, a defined audience, a sequence, and somewhere for interest to land. Activity has none of that, and it's why so much partner marketing feels like effort with no return that builds on itself. Proper marketing campaigns fix that.
If you can't say what your last three pieces of marketing were for, that's your answer.
Your Microsoft funding goes unspent - or spent badly
Microsoft puts real money behind partner marketing, and every year a chunk of it either goes unclaimed or gets burned on something safe because the clock was running out.
Claiming it properly takes planning, evidence and paperwork, and it needs someone who knows what "good" looks like when the campaign is reviewed. Channel partner marketing has its own rules. If nobody in your business has the time to learn them, the money quietly goes elsewhere. Start with the Microsoft Co-op funds hub.
Your website says the same thing as everyone else's
Trusted advisor. End-to-end solutions. Award-winning team. People-first approach.
Too many Microsoft partners still sound the same, and it's completely understandable - the language is everywhere, it feels professional, and it's never got anyone into trouble. But it doesn't tell a buyer anything, and it gives your Microsoft account team nothing to repeat when they're recommending someone in a meeting you're not in.
You don't have to be radical. You have to be specific. What do you actually do, for who, and what happened last time? That's a value proposition job before it's a design one.
Growth is coming from the same three places it always has
Referrals, an existing account expanding, and one very good relationship with a Microsoft seller.
That's a decent position - right up until one of those three moves. The problem with relationship-led growth is that it's hard to increase deliberately. You can't turn it up next quarter because a target moved.
Marketing's job is to build the demand that isn't dependent on who you happen to know. That takes consistency over months, which is exactly the thing internal teams struggle to protect.
Sales say the leads are rubbish, marketing say sales don't follow up
Old argument, still going. Usually it means nobody's agreed what a lead actually is.
If "downloaded a guide" and "asked for a quote" land in the same place, of course sales are going to lose faith in the list. Fixing that isn't a big transformation programme. It's an afternoon defining stages, a bit of CRM hygiene, and someone owning it afterwards.
You've hired a marketer and it's still not landing
This one catches people out. You bring in a marketing exec, and six months on you've got better social and a tidier brand, but the pipeline hasn't moved.
That's rarely a bad hire. It's usually one person being asked to be a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, a web developer, an event manager and a demand gen specialist at once. Nobody's all six.
Full-service marketing support works well alongside an internal marketer, not instead of one - they keep the strategy and the relationships in-house, and pull in the specialist hands when a campaign needs them.
You can't answer "what's working?"
Not "how many likes did we get". What's generating conversations, and what isn't.
If nobody can answer that, every marketing decision becomes a matter of taste, and the loudest opinion in the room wins. Scalable marketing services live or die on knowing which of the ten things you do is doing eight tenths of the work - so you can do more of it and stop apologising for cutting the rest.
So what do you actually do about it?
Don't start by hiring anyone or buying anything. Start by getting clearer.
Write down who you're actually for
Then niche it down further than feels comfortable.
Pick two or three outcomes
What you want marketing to deliver over the next six months. No more than three.
Be honest about capacity
What your team can genuinely own week in, week out - not on a good week.
Fill the gap with outside help
Specialists, not generalists, for the things nobody internally has the time or skills to run.
Most IT reseller marketing problems aren't a lack of ideas. There's usually a whiteboard full of them. It's the lack of anyone with the time, the skills and the mandate to see them through.
The result? Marketing that keeps going when the quarter gets busy, instead of being the first thing dropped.
Nathan, Founder & CEO, Resultful