Budgets are moving toward partner technology, not partner cash. Forrester’s Partner Ecosystem Marketing Survey, 2026 found that 75 percent of partner ecosystem marketing decision-makers plan to increase their overall technology investment over the next year, and 65 percent of the vendors already running a partner marketing automation platform (PMAP) plan to spend even more on it. PartnerStack’s State of Partnerships in GTM 2026 report, based on interviews with 100 senior revenue, marketing and partnership leaders at B2B SaaS companies with at least 50 million dollars in revenue, found 69 percent of those companies plan to increase partnership investment in the coming year, and 30 percent now call partnerships a top strategic priority for 2026.
The dollars partners actually receive tell a different story. Techaisle surveyed 4,115 channel partners and asked them to rank the vendor incentives that matter most to them. Market development funds, the co-op cash vendors have handed out for decades to subsidize local ads and events, came in 11th. Partners ranked outcome-based funds first, ahead of certification and training funds, straight discounts, solution development funds and workshop funding. Among managed service providers specifically, Techaisle reports that 83 percent prioritize outcome-based funds over the traditional co-op model.
The gap is not about money disappearing, it is about where vendors keep sending it. MDF programs built for print ads and co-branded trade show booths have not adapted well to partners who now run their own digital campaigns. Techaisle ties the complaint to three specific failures: heavy administrative burden on claims, a mismatch with how partners actually market today, and a preference for partner-branded content over vendor-branded material. None of that shows up in the technology investment numbers, because a PMAP typically automates the MDF claims process rather than replace the incentive sitting underneath it.
Forrester’s own framing of the problem lines up with what partners are saying. The firm argues that partner ecosystems do not fail because leaders stop believing in them, they fail because execution cannot scale, and its survey found nearly 70 percent of partners still operate at low or medium levels of marketing and demand generation maturity despite the new platform spending. A PMAP license fixes a workflow. It does not fix an incentive that the partners using that workflow have already stopped valuing.
For a vendor rebuilding its channel program this quarter, the numbers point to a reallocation rather than a bigger check. Techaisle’s own recommendation is specific: move roughly half of MDF budgets into solution development funds, a quarter into outcome-based rewards tied to customer outcomes, and the rest into training and certification. Whether that exact split fits a given program is a separate question. What the three surveys agree on is that spending more on partner technology while leaving the underlying incentive model untouched will keep producing partners who are active on a platform and still rank the fund meant to support them near the bottom of the list.
Sources referenced in reporting: Techaisle, Why 4,115 Partners Say MDF Is Obsolete, Forrester, Partner Marketing Automation Platform Investment On The Rise, PartnerStack, State of Partnerships in GTM 2026.