Twenty years in the game? Great. But what have you done lately?

"We've been doing this for 25 years."

It's on the homepage, the About page, the proposal and the LinkedIn banner. And to be fair, it's easy to see why. Longevity feels safe. It suggests stability, a track record and a business that's weathered a few storms.

But here's the uncomfortable bit... years of experience don't make you the best. They don't even guarantee you're good. What actually counts is how relevant that experience is to the person sat in front of you, right now.

Let's be honest with ourselves. Someone can do the same job for 20 years and learn it once, then repeat it 19 times. Someone else can do it for three years and be neck-deep in exactly the challenges you're facing today.

Which one would you rather have in your corner?

Experience only has value when it transfers. If an agency has spent two decades running campaigns for retailers, hospitality brands and manufacturers, that's genuinely impressive, but it tells you very little about whether they understand how a Microsoft partner goes to market. The skills might overlap. The context almost certainly doesn't.

And context is where the results come from.

If you're a Microsoft partner, you already know your world doesn't look like anyone else's. You've got Co-op funding and the rules that come with it, solution areas, designations and specialisations, Partner Center, and distributor goals being passed down onto you. Then there's the constant balancing act between Microsoft's messaging and your own.

A generalist agency with a big number on the wall has to learn all of that on your time, and on your budget. You end up explaining what a solution area is, why the campaign has to land before the end of the fiscal year, and why you can't just "do a quick post" using Microsoft's assets without thinking about how you stand apart from the hundreds of other partners using the same ones.

That isn't a small cost. It's weeks of onboarding, drafts that miss the mark and, frankly, a lot of frustration on both sides.

The result? Marketing that looks polished but sounds like everybody else's. And we've said it time and time again - too many Microsoft partners already sound the same.

This cuts both ways, and it's worth pausing on.

Partners fall into the exact same trap when they market themselves. "Established in 2004." "Over 20 years of IT expertise." "Trusted by hundreds of businesses." Don't get me wrong, none of it is untrue. But an end customer reading it is asking one simple question: have you solved a problem like mine, for a business like mine, recently?

A 12-year-old case study about a server migration doesn't answer that. A sharp, recent story about helping a 200-seat professional services firm get Copilot-ready does.

So before you lead with your founding date, ask yourself:

If your experience ticks all three, shout about it. If it doesn't, it's probably doing less work than you think.

Here's where we practise what we preach.

Resultful is the marketing agency built for Microsoft partners. We made a very strategic decision to only proactively work with Microsoft partners. Yes, that means we turn work away sometimes, and that's OK.

Why? Because relevance compounds. Every campaign we run, every Co-op conversation we have and every proposition we help sharpen feeds straight back into the next partner we work with. We aren't learning your world from scratch. We're already in it.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

We research the ecosystem ourselves. We've just surveyed 250 UK&I Microsoft partners about how they market, how it's funded and whether any of it can be proven. And we've done the same on the other side of the Atlantic with the USA. That's current, first-hand insight, rather than an assumption carried over from another industry. See Microsoft Partner Marketing, Measured.

We bring partners together. Our monthly Microsoft Partner Marketing Meet-Up gives marketers inside Microsoft partners a room full of peers to chat through what's working, with no hard sell.

We speak the language. Co-op, solution areas, distributor-led campaigns and Microsoft's sellers and account teams are the day job for us, so none of it needs explaining.

Now, you might think any agency could say something similar. And perhaps some could. But it's the way you evidence it that counts, and relevance is much easier to prove when it's the only thing you do.

Whether you're choosing an agency, hiring a marketer or deciding how to position your own business, swap the question. Stop asking "how long have you been doing this?" and start asking:

Experience still matters, of course. It just needs to be the right experience, and it needs to be current. Busy isn't the same as well directed, and old isn't the same as relevant.