Imagine you and fifty other MSPs each getting $10K in co-op funds to run a ‘Thought Leadership’ webinar. You target the same CISO persona with the same vendor slides and taglines. By the time your event goes live, your message is drowned out in a sea of look-alike e-vites.
While vendors funnel an estimated $50 billion into Market Development Funds (MDF) programs each year—over half of which goes unspent due to planning or execution hurdles—partners still treat MDF like free money to push generic, vendor-branded collateral rather than their own story Wikipedia.
The Hidden Risks of “Vendor-Paid, Vendor-Branded” Campaigns
- Message Saturation
- When dozens of partners echo the same vendor narrative, email open rates and click-throughs plummet.
- Undifferentiated Positioning
- You become “Partner #23” rather than “The SOC-as-a-Service Experts for Healthcare.”
- Low ROI / Wasted Funds
- Generic demand-gen campaigns are the path of least resistance, “it’s not our money anyway, so let’s just spend it”, meanwhile targeted smart ABM approaches yielded as much as 200% better ROI. Forrester.
- Eroded Partner Credibility
- Customers quickly learn you’re just republishing the vendor’s playbook, not taking the time to understand their unique challenges.
Flip the Script: Own Your Differentiators
Brand-First Messaging
- Lead with your services: “Our XDR practice, built on [Vendor], combines 24/7 SOC support and custom playbooks to reduce breach dwell time by 60 percent.”
- Weave in vendor tech as an enabler of your real value.
Persona-Plus-Pain Alignment
- Focus on 1–2 critical pain points you solve (e.g., compliance, incident response SLAs), rather than generic feature demos.
- Don’t sell the platform, sell the outcome. Position your MDF-funded webinar as “How to cut incident response times by 50 percent in highly regulated industries,” not “Intro to [Vendor] XDR.”
Package Your Value-Add Services Around the Product
- Modular Bundles: “XDR + 24/7 SOC + Automated Compliance Reporting”
- Outcome-Based Offers: “Predictable $5 K/month SOC service for financial services firms”
- Proof Points: Showcase case studies and TCO models illustrating your IP lift.
When you lead with your service model, including your pricing tiers, SLAs, and success stories, you’re not just another co-op check recipient. You become your customer's trusted advisor.
Vendor-Agnostic Relationship Building
- Focus on the customer
- Begin with the customer’s business objectives, really hear what their concerns are, where they’re having problems
- Give advice based on best practices you’ve seen, and always recommend the best-fit option from ANY vendor.
- Long-Term Thinking
- Be honest about whichever technology solves the customer’s problem, whether that’s from Vendor A, Vendor B, or an open-source tool.
- Always be building trust, and even if it doesn’t pay the bills today, your client will thank you for it—it may even lead to new vendor relationships.
- Stickier Client Relationships
- Shift from one-off webinars to ongoing thought leadership virtual lunch-and-learns, where you manage the full lifecycle of the solution.
- When customers know you’re not pushing one vendor’s roadmap, they’ll invite you back because they trust your objectivity.
Roadmap for Your Next Co-Op Campaign
- Audit
- Catalog every past demand gen action. Highlight where you sounded identical to every other partner. Remember what sucked, and note things that were good.
- Position
- Document and routinize your top three differentiators: e.g. fastest service, local expertise, service-level guarantees, etc.
- Plan
- Build a content calendar swapping pure vendor-branded assets for hybrid “Your Brand + Vendor” assets—Make sure you meet Proof of Performance requirements!
- Execute and Measure
- Treat it like a product launch: set clear KPIs, run A/B tests on messaging, optimize daily, and don’t be afraid to lean on third party service providers to get an outside perspective.
- Iterate
- Double down on what resonates. Partners that apply rigorous measurement practices achieve up to $4 in business value for every $1 invested in analytics and performance tracking 1827 Marketing.
That's a Wrap
MDF and co-op funds can still be powerful growth levers. Be creative about how you wield them to tell your story. Stop rolling the dice on “me-too” vendor-centric campaigns, and start thinking customer-centric problem solving. This leverages your partner money to make a long term investment in the one asset no vendor can replicate: your expertise, approach, and relationships.
Get off the MDF treadmill. Let’s map out your unique playbook, and let’s not let your co-op funds go to waste.