Marketing Development Funds (MDF) are a powerful force within partner ecosystems. MDF investments are how you spread the word about your products and drive demand with and through an extended army of partner marketing teams. MDF allocations boost the marketing budgets for your partners in exchange for a promise that they will drive awareness and demand for your joint or complementary solutions. Emotionally, MDF investments signify strategic importance and confidence in a partnership.
When you have several thousand important partners, it begs the question: How do you prioritize which partners should get more MDF investment? Ideally, you’d invest additional MDF towards partners aligned to specific corporate priorities, like sourcing new logo deals, increasing accounts in a specific industry, or moving existing customers onto your new subscription services. But it’s hard to know which partner(s) can actually move the needle for each specific goal. Some partners have better relationships in one industry or region. Others are great at migrating customers onto your new services. And when it comes to new logos, it’s almost impossible to know which partners have the most unpenetrated new accounts you should be selling to.
Now, with new partner ecosystem platforms like PartnerTap, companies can instantly map millions of accounts with each partner to quickly and confidently identify new logo accounts to sell into as well as mutual accounts for cross and up-sell opportunities. Through PartnerTap’s account mapping, you can instantly identify and prioritize very actionable lists of companies for you and your partners to target with your MDF investment.
In this article, we break down three easy steps you can follow to turn your MDF investments into:
- New logo pipeline
- Expansion pipeline
- Actionable data to achieve your other strategic priorities
Step 1: Use detailed partner data to identify new logo and expansion accounts
PartnerTap’s enterprise-grade account mapping software gives channel and partner teams a secure platform to map accounts with partners. PartnerTap syncs with your CRM and lets you upload partner spreadsheets or invite partners to connect with you directly for real-time data sharing. PartnerTap will instantly map your partner accounts against all the accounts in your CRM and identify your overlapping accounts, mutual customers, and unpenetrated accounts.
Once you’ve mapped data with a partner, you can source both mutual and new logo accounts in just one click.
Clicking into “Mutual Customers” shows you accounts to target with up and cross-sell offerings
- Review the account data you now have for mutual customers with your partner.
- Use filters to narrow down the list of mutual customers based on industry, segment, existing products, or any other field relevant for cross and up-sell opportunities.
- Export the list of mutual customers you want this partner to target with your MDF investment.
Clicking into “Hot Prospects” shows you new logo accounts this partner can help you sell into
- Review the account data you now have for each new logo account. Information your partner has shared is available in the green columns.
- Use filters to narrow down your list of new logo accounts based on industry, segment, region, or any other field you’ve brought into PartnerTap.
- Export the list of target new logo accounts you want this partner to target with your MDF investment.
Clicking into “Help Your Partner” shows you the accounts that are new logos for your partner
- Review the data you now have for each account that could become a new logo for your partner.
- Use filters to narrow down the list of new logos for your partner based on industry, segment, region, or any other criteria you know is important to this partner.
- Export the list of high-value new logo accounts you want to show your partner to get them thinking strategically about your MDF investment.
Step 2: Focus partner marketing campaigns on these hyper-targeted account lists
Now that you have targeted lists of new logo and expansion accounts with each partner, it’s easier to prioritize your MDF investment where it can make the biggest impact. But you still need to know it will be invested in high-quality campaigns that work. That’s where specialists like PureChannels, JSG, Spur-Reply, and AchieveUnite come in. Our channel agency partners have decades of experience designing, building, and running campaigns with and for partners. Each of these companies leverage data from PartnerTap to build hyper-targeted campaigns that can turn your MDF into new pipeline for you and your partners. Whether you use a channel agency or your internal marketing teams take charge – make sure they understand how easy it is to create hyper-targeted account lists with each partner using PartnerTap.
Increase Partner Marketing ROI with Hyper-Targeted ABM Account Lists
Step 3: Use ecosystem data to craft your MDF allocation strategy
With PartnerTap it is easy to repeat step 1 above with tens, hundreds, and even thousands of partners to create your new and mutual logo account lists. This builds up an ecosystem-wide view of your real-time partner data that can inform your ad hoc MDF allocation strategy when new funds become available.
Partner data truly is the holy grail of prioritizing MDF investments. It not only gives you the ability to confidently allocate funds to partners best positioned to support your company’s goals, it also gives you the roadmap of the exact accounts to target and through which partner. PartnerTap makes it easy to quickly get the partner data needed to make informed decisions on where and how to focus your MDF.
Make your MDF investments go further
We built PartnerTap to help companies drive more revenue with and through partners. It has now become the must-have enterprise co-selling and partner marketing solution for companies that need to hit aggressive revenue goals with fewer resources. If you’d like to learn more and hear strategies for unlocking growth, you can request a demo or contact us for a strategy discussion.