How to Get a Platform to Pay for Your Marketing
What partner managers actually want to see on an MDF, and what makes them push it through.
Most agencies treat MDF like a vending machine. Put the right form in, press the button, money falls out. Then nothing falls out, and they decide the machine is broken.
MDF stands for market development funds. It's the budget a platform like Shopify, Klaviyo or Gorgias sets aside to help partners run marketing that, in theory, grows the platform too. Agencies hear "free money from Klaviyo" and stop thinking. That's the whole problem, right there.
You can see how little thinking is going on by looking at what most of them spend it on. The default move is to blow the budget on a dinner, book a nice venue, sort the wine, and then ask the platform to invite the brands. Sit with that for a second. You've taken the platform's money to throw a party, and now you want them to bring the guests as well. They fund the room and they fill the room, and you stand at the front of it taking the credit. Somehow this is the industry norm.
It was never free money. It's a platform handing you its own pipeline problem and hoping you'll solve it cheaper than their in-house team would. Once you see it that way, everything about what you put in the document changes.
A lot of the time, tech partners sponsor events because they want to strengthen the relationship with the agency, not just chase leads. If the real value is facetime and goodwill with the team, that's a good pitch on its own and one we're happy to back. What we'd love to see more of is clarity: clear pricing, realistic expectations, and no surprises once we're in. Event pricing seems to go up the moment it lands in a tech partner's inbox, so it helps when costs are laid out plainly from the start. And if the organising agency is paying less because they're driving the majority of registrations, that's completely fair, it's just helpful when it's communicated upfront. The agencies that earn repeat budget tend to be the ones who make things easy to understand from day one.
Your partner manager has a number too
Here's the bit nobody tells you. The partner manager you're emailing isn't the person who approves the money. They're the person who has to walk into a room full of their own colleagues and defend why your idea deserves a slice of a finite budget.
So you're not really writing the MDF for them. You're writing it so they can forward it, more or less untouched, and look clever for backing you. Make it easy and they'll champion you internally. Make it vague and they'll let it die, because nobody spends their own credibility arguing for a request they don't understand.
It's the same trick as writing for a buying committee. You're not persuading one person. You're arming one person to persuade the people you'll never get in front of.
And that person has a target. Sourced pipeline, influenced revenue, partner-attributed leads, whatever their internal scorecard calls it. Every line of your request should help them hit it. Write about your brand awareness and your beautiful campaign and you read as a cost. Write about the leads it puts in their pipeline and you read as an asset. Same request. Opposite outcome.
From my perspective, there must be evidence that the activity is a part of a full-funnel strategy. Even if I'm just funding a one-off tactic, they need to prove that it aligns with a larger strategy that helps them grow their agency and contributes to their objectives.
Especially since there are so many events in the UK, where we're potentially seeing event fatigue, demonstrating that the activity is part of a larger plan will be the difference between yes and no.
What actually goes in the doc
We ran a CRM benchmark survey this year with Polaris, partly funded by Klaviyo MDF. It got approved, the budget went up during the process rather than down, and the platform ended up offering to promote the finished thing through their own webinars, social and email. So this isn't theory. Here's what was in it, and why each part matters.
An objective written in their language, not yours. The goal wasn't "raise Polaris's profile." It was a piece of research that would surface ecom brands actively unhappy with their current CRM, which is to say, brands the platform would love to talk to. The objective was their pipeline, dressed up as a research project. That's why it landed.
ROI maths you can actually see. Not "this will deliver strong ROI." An actual breakdown, in an actual spreadsheet, linked alongside the deck. We lay it out as a chain. Expected leads, an assumed conversion rate on those leads, the average contract value on Klaviyo based on the target list, and from all of that an expected ROI multiple.
That multiple is the number they care about, because most partners want to see at least a 4x return on any MDF as a baseline. And that is the measured, attributable return, before you even touch the long tail of someone seeing the campaign and deciding to convert six months later, which nobody credits you for but everyone benefits from. Hand them the forecast with the workings and you've done their justification for them. Hide it behind a confident adjective and you've given them nothing to defend.
An itemised budget. Where every pound goes. Outreach, tooling, the survey build, incentives. Vague totals make approvers nervous because they can't tell what they're signing off. A line-by-line breakdown reads as "this person has done this before."
Proof the thing is real. This is the one most people miss. Before the survey was even finished, we sent the partner manager a live link to the half-built version. Not a mockup. The actual thing, rough edges and all. A working artifact does more for your credibility than ten slides describing one. It says the project exists whether or not they fund it, and they're being offered a share, not asked to gamble on a maybe.
The partners most likely to secure MDF are the ones already delivering value. If you're bringing leads, creating opportunities with mutual customers, and demonstrating success together, you're naturally going to be prioritised. Budgets are limited, so every investment needs a clear path to ROI. It's not just about sponsoring an event or getting logo placement - it's about meaningful engagement and having a plan to convert those conversations into pipeline through strong follow-up. That's what makes an MDF proposal stand out."
A good partner makes it bigger, not cheaper
We went in deliberately modest. The plan was to get somewhere between 20 and 30 brands to complete the survey, with the platform covering a small voucher for each one as a thank you for their time.
Their response wasn't to trim it. It was to open the budget. They came back and said they'd fund vouchers for up to 100 brands if we could fill it. More respondents, more credible research, more money on the table to make it happen. You brace for a haggle and instead get told to be more ambitious.
We got to 50. And before anyone reads that as falling short, look at the market. The Dutch mid-market and enterprise ecom space, once you strip out every brand already on Klaviyo, is not a big pool. Fifty real, qualified, non-customer brands out of a universe that small is a serious result. It handed the platform a clean read on exactly the brands they aren't talking to yet, which is the whole reason they funded it.
The lesson holds whatever the numbers come out at. When a partner team leans in and asks you to go bigger or more rigorous, say yes fast. A more ambitious project justifies a more ambitious budget, and the pushback is them telling you how to make the work more useful to them. You're not protecting a pot of money. You're co-designing something they'll want to put their name on. Just stay honest about your addressable market while you do it, because promising 100 in a market that only holds 60 is how you torch the relationship you've just built.
Answer the lead question before they ask it
The moment the money was approved, the very next email was about leads. How will we get them. In what format. On what timeline. Then the same questions again the following week, slightly rephrased.
This is the tell. The leads are the entire point for them. The research, the campaign, the lovely report, all of it is scaffolding around the bit they actually report on internally. So don't wait to be asked three times. Build the answer into the original document.
We gave them a clear timeline. Outbound warming up in month one, with the first survey results landing by the end of it. The campaign running hard through month two. The report launching in month three. And we offered two ways to receive leads: a shared sheet updated every couple of weeks, and a joint Slack channel firing real-time notifications as qualified names came in. They wanted both, obviously. Real-time visibility on pipeline is catnip to a partner manager with a number to hit.
Make the leads easy to see, easy to attribute to the partnership, and easy for them to screenshot into their own internal update. You're not just generating leads. You're generating their evidence that backing you worked.
The part that earns the next one
Approval is where most agencies go quiet. They take the money, disappear, and resurface months later with a finished asset and a thud of silence.
We sent a detailed update every single week. Survey completion rates. The spread of platforms showing up in responses. Outbound numbers, including the unsexy ones: 99% inbox placement, LinkedIn acceptance rates, reply rates that were honestly a bit low in places. We flagged the specific brands ranking their current platform badly and signalling they'd switch within the year, and handed those straight over.
None of that was contractually required. All of it did the same job. It kept the partner warm, it proved the money was working in close to real time, and it made the partner manager look good in their own updates without lifting a finger. That is the relationship that gets your next three MDF requests waved through.
It also changed the shape of the whole thing. By the end, the platform wasn't the bank anymore. They were the distribution. The finished benchmark came out with the platform sitting top of the rankings, which gave them every reason to promote it, and they offered to run a webinar, push it on social and email it to their list.
And it's worth being precise about what counts as a lead here. The brands who filled in the survey were only the first wave, the leads that came from the survey itself. The report it produced is now live and being actively promoted, and it's on track to generate hundreds more MQLs for both Klaviyo and Polaris. The survey was the seed. The report is the crop, and it keeps yielding long after the MDF was spent.
The MDF paid for the research. The relationship paid for the reach. The second one is worth far more and costs you nothing but a weekly email.
What to do on Monday
If you've got an MDF request sitting in drafts, stop polishing the pitch and do three things to it.
Rewrite the objective so the first sentence is about their pipeline, not your profile. Add the spreadsheet with the actual maths, linked, visible, defensible. And write the lead-sharing plan now, before anyone asks, with a real-time option in it.
Then accept, before you even send it, that they'll come back wanting it bigger or more rigorous. Treat that as the platform helping you spend more of their money, not less. Because that's exactly what it is.
The agencies that lose at MDF think they're extracting budget from a reluctant platform. The ones that win understand they're being hired to hit someone else's number. Do that job well, visibly, every week, and the funding stops being a form you fill in and starts being a relationship that pays you back in reach.
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