Partnership Leaders published their 2026 Ecosystem Compass earlier this year. The methodology is straightforward and worth repeating: 5,000 companies surveyed, the top 75 shortlisted through interviews, the top 10 ranked. The follow-on webinar last week brought in leaders from Ansira, Sage, AWS, and Okta to go deeper on the themes the research exposed.
I watched the full session and four signals stood out. None of them are surprises in isolation, but seeing them surface together inside one panel made the underlying message harder to ignore: the bar for what good looks like in partner programs has moved. Most programs are now behind it.
Signal 1: MDF is the canary in the coal mine
Asher Mathew opened with the headline number that should make every channel leader pause: roughly 50% of marketing development funds go unused on average across the industry. He then ran a live poll of webinar attendees on MDF maturity. Around 60% said they either had no MDF program or were just getting started. Just 2% described their program as fully integrated and optimized.
Laura Pulling Brash from Ansira described a four-rung maturity ladder for MDF ROI. At the bottom, you're connecting MDF investment to partner revenue at the partner level — basic correlation. One rung up, you're tracking which activity types actually drive results. Higher up, you're tracking pipeline attribution by partner, region, and activity mix. At the top, your CRM, PRM, and MDF tool are talking to each other, giving partner managers a single source of truth for strategic conversations with their partners.
What struck me about this ladder isn't the technical sophistication. It's that MDF maturity tracks almost exactly with the things you'd want to be true about a partner program overall: clean partner data, sales-marketing alignment, governance and compliance, partner-facing usability, and pipeline visibility. If you can run MDF well, you can probably run everything else well. If you can't, the rest of your program is probably struggling too.
That makes MDF a useful diagnostic. If your finance team can't tell you the ROI of last quarter's MDF spend, the issue isn't the spreadsheet. It's that your program doesn't have the underlying infrastructure to answer that question for anything.
Signal 2: Percentage-based MDF is the past. Targeted, discretionary MDF is the present.
Tanya Drake from Sage described the shift her team made from a model where partners earned MDF as a percentage of sales (essentially a back-end commission) to a discretionary model where MDF is allocated against specific strategic priorities like microverticals or new market entry.
This isn't a cosmetic change. A percentage-based program is reactive. It pays partners for what they've already done and reinforces existing behavior. A discretionary, targeted program is forward-looking. It funds the partner activities the company wants more of next quarter.
The webinar poll on targeting maturity showed the same shape as the MDF maturity poll: 31% of attendees said they were still funding most partners who ask, 20% have criteria but aren't applying them consistently, and only 11% said their targeting strategy is fully defined and backed by data.
Signal 3: A major partnership cannot be one-tenth of seven people's jobs
Michael Baldwin from AWS and Ron Pavezan from Okta said the same thing in different ways, and neither of them was prompted to. Both observed that the partner companies who succeed at scale with a major platform are the ones who assign a champion with budget, authority, and a clear plan. The partner companies who struggle are the ones who spread the responsibility across multiple people, each of whom owns a fraction of it.
Michael shared an example of a partner who went from zero AWS revenue to over $40 million in co-sell in 15 months by going all-in. Ron's parallel example was Okta's own experience: by doubling down on AWS as a partnership, Okta crossed $1 billion in AWS marketplace revenue — a milestone AWS shared publicly at the Seattle summit referenced at the close of the session.
The principle here is one that channel leaders should be raising internally before the next planning cycle. If your company is treating a critical platform partnership as a side project, the partnership will perform like a side project. The fix is not more partners. It's more concentration on the partnerships that actually move the business.
Signal 4: Co-sell is moving from two AEs to one integrated stack
Ron's forward-looking framing of co-sell was the most interesting moment of the panel. The version of co-sell most of us know — two account executives from two companies working a deal together — will continue to exist. But Ron's prediction is that as products become more tightly integrated, the selling motion collapses. One AE sells what looks to the customer like one product, even though it's two or three companies' technology stitched together on the back end.
The proof of this is already in the AWS Bedrock model. Every time Okta sells, AWS is also being sold, because Okta runs on AWS. Every time a customer consumes a frontier model through Bedrock, the model provider's revenue flows through AWS's billing console. The selling motion is unified even though the products are not.
For channel leaders, the takeaway is to look hard at where your product has natural gravity inside another company's selling motion. Where does your product become almost mandatory once a customer adopts a partner's solution? That's where co-sell stops being a two-rep effort and starts being a structural advantage.
What this means for 2026 planning
Each of these four signals points to a specific, addressable gap. MDF maturity is solvable with the right tooling and discipline. Targeted MDF is a policy change supported by data. Concentrating on fewer, deeper partnerships is a leadership decision. And finding the integrations where your product has natural gravity is a strategic exercise you can run this quarter.
The harder question is whether your program is willing to be honest about which rungs of which ladders you're actually on. The Ecosystem Compass made the maturity curve measurable. The follow-on webinar made the gaps specific. The work now is closing them, one rung at a time.
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