Market Development Funds

Marketing departments are focused on winning new customers and maximising the return of marketing spend.  A market development fund, or MDF, is an important part of a channel partner marketing strategy.  A specific budget used to incentivise and support channel partners undertake their own localised marketing efforts.  The result is ideally to win new customers to your brand through your channel partners.  The fund can have non-monetary support often in the form of training, education and marketing support services.

Many organisations run their MDF programmes on spreadsheets but these typically become overwhelming and quickly loose accuracy.  The spreadsheets become cumbersome, errors get introduced and the level of complexity and understanding needed to keep on top of them is lost when key staff members are away or leave, compromising the integrity of the MDF programme.  Add to this the manual nature of using spreadsheets means that compiling and integrating data is intensive, especially when you have an international operation with many partners and internal stakeholders.  And to add to the headache is reporting.  An MDF manager needs accurate and real time reports.  When needing to react to changing market conditions the data needs to be dynamic, robust and easily accessible, i.e. self-served.

I have previously partnered with Logic Software and used their MDF management tool to help me with my channel partner strategy.  Key features I benefited from included:

• Clearer and better understanding of channel activity to easily identify what works and work was less effective,

• Knowledge of channel performance so action could be taken quickly before dips became pits,

• Data around partner performance,

• Partners would apply online for funds and the tool collected all the relevant information,

• Strong approval rules with reports, but without committees!

• Auto expiry of allocated but unused funds,

• Real time reporting across the geographies and channels,

• Integration into my CRM (Salesforce) so both systems where kept in sync.