Co-Marketing

Co-marketing is the most common partnership activity that produces zero revenue. Two logos on a webinar deck, 80 attendees, a polite thank-you email, and nothing meaningful in pipeline 90 days later. When co-marketing works, it's because both sides treat the activity as pipeline generation with a defined audience, joint follow-up commitments, and outcome tracking — not because they posted a co-branded blog post and walked away.

Common Co-Marketing Formats

B2B SaaS co-marketing typically takes one of these shapes:

• Joint webinars — Both vendors present to a combined audience. Cheap to produce, easy to measure registrations, hardest to convert to pipeline.
• Co-branded content — Whitepapers, research reports, ebooks, podcast episodes. Promoted by both sides, gated for lead capture.
• Joint case studies — A mutual customer's story featuring both products. Highest-converting asset by far; hardest to source.
• Co-hosted events — Dinners, regional meetups, conference happy hours. Expensive per attendee but high-trust.
• Joint campaigns — Coordinated paid media, outbound sequences, or ABM efforts targeting accounts both vendors care about.

Co-Marketing vs Co-Selling

• Co-marketing — Activity at the top of the funnel. Joint demand generation. Audiences and leads are shared.
• Co-selling — Activity at the bottom of the funnel. Two sales teams working on the same deal. Pipeline and revenue are shared.

Most mature partnerships do both. Co-marketing generates the joint pipeline that co-selling then closes.

The Connection to MDF

Co-marketing activity is the most common use of Market Development Fund (MDF) dollars. A vendor accrues MDF to a reseller based on revenue; the reseller proposes co-marketing activities (events, paid ads, content series); the vendor approves spend; the reseller executes and submits proof of activity for reimbursement.

For non-reseller partnerships (technology alliances especially), co-marketing is typically funded out of each side's general marketing budget rather than MDF, with rough 50/50 cost splits.

Why Most Co-Marketing Underperforms

• Wrong audience overlap — Two vendors with non-overlapping customer bases run a joint webinar. The audience attends one side's; the other side gets nothing.
• No joint follow-up — Webinar ends. Vendor A's team follows up with their attendees, Vendor B's team follows up with theirs. No joint account-level outreach. Pipeline dies.
• Generic content — Whitepaper about "the future of [category]" with no specific point of view from either vendor. Reads like AI slop. No one converts.
• No outcome metric — Co-marketing measured on impressions, not influenced pipeline. Partners can't tell which activities to do more of.

What Good Co-Marketing Looks Like

Three rules for co-marketing that produces pipeline:

1. Pick a single shared use case. The content, event, or campaign answers a specific question your overlapping audience asks. Generic doesn't work.
2. Commit to joint outbound. Both sides identify 50–100 accounts to target before the activity; both run coordinated outreach for 30 days after.
3. Measure influenced pipeline. Tag every account touched by the activity. Report 60- and 90-day pipeline and closed-won attributed to those accounts.