Industry Research · CRM & Partner Software
The channel is drowning in money it can’t figure out how to spend
Every year, tens of billions in partner-marketing budgets go untouched. Here’s why — and why the software to fix it just became non-optional.
The bottom line
- $35 billion in co-op and marketing-development funds goes unclaimed every year in the US — not because it isn’t there, but because the process to hand it out is broken. The unspent-money problem ↓
- “Partner-led” selling is quietly winning — partner-influenced deals tend to close faster and win more often, which is why partner software went from nice-to-have to mandatory. Why everyone’s switching ↓
- AI and the big cloud marketplaces are rewriting the rules of how this software works and who buys through it. What’s changing next ↓
There’s a strange thing happening inside the software business. Companies are spending more than ever to sell through partners instead of directly — and at the same time, they’re leaving a fortune on the table.
Not a rounding-error fortune. A real one.
The unspent-money problem
Vendors set aside huge marketing budgets for their partners, then make them so hard to claim that most of the money never moves.
When a software vendor sells through partners, it hands those partners a marketing budget — “market development funds,” in the trade. The idea is simple: help your partners advertise, and everyone sells more. The execution is anything but.
The reason is friction, not apathy. ZINFI’s channel survey found the approval portals are simply too complex to be worth the effort for many partners, and reimbursement can drag on for months. So the budget sits — quarter after quarter — while both sides quietly lose sales they could have made.
If you run a partner program, that unclaimed budget is money walking out the door every year — and the fix is almost always the process, not spending more.
Why everyone’s switching to partner-led selling
Direct sales keeps getting more expensive. Partner-influenced deals are cheaper, faster, and stickier — so the software that runs them is booming.
Winning business the direct way keeps getting more expensive, so partners start to look less like a channel and more like a lifeline — and the deal data backs that up.
That’s the whole story behind the boom in partner-relationship-management tools. When partner-sourced deals close faster and win more often, tracking them in a spreadsheet stops being defensible. SNS Insider values the market at about $1.27 billion in 2023, growing to roughly $4.14 billion by 2032. Adoption backs it up: among B2B software companies above $25 million in ARR, the share running a dedicated PRM platform climbed from 39% in 2023 to 62% in 2026.
If you sell software and aren’t tracking partner-sourced deals properly, you’re probably undercounting your best channel — and under-investing in it.
What’s changing next
Two forces — AI and the big cloud marketplaces — are reshaping both how the software works and where the buying happens.
The old way of managing partners was manual: an account manager, a spreadsheet, a lot of email. That era is ending on two fronts at once.
AI is taking over the busywork — onboarding partners, localizing marketing content, flagging fraud, predicting which partners will actually produce. And the cloud marketplaces are becoming the store shelf. More and more software is bought straight through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, which means vendors have to plug their partner programs into those checkout lines or miss the sale entirely.
That’s the shape of the next few years: the companies that fix the plumbing — spend the funds, track the deals, meet buyers where they already are — pull ahead. The ones still running the channel on goodwill and spreadsheets keep leaving that $35 billion on the table.
Whatever partner tool you shortlist, check two things: does it use AI to kill the busywork, and does it plug into the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces where buying now happens?
Top CRM platforms in this category
The top-scored CRM platforms in our rankings, judged on the same six criteria. We don’t yet score PRM as its own subcategory, so this is the broader CRM & sales category.
- 1 S Salesforce CRM Pricing model starts at $25 per user/month, with a higher tier plan and enterprise pricing available 9.3
- 2 J Jungo Mortgage CRM Enterprise pricing available 9.2
How we measured this
This is a synthesis of public sources, not original data. Each figure links to the specific report it came from (below), gathered in August 2026 and covering 2023–2026. Three of the seven sources are vendor-published (ZINFI, Crossbeam and Tackle sell in this market) — we flag those rather than hide them.
Two numbers deserve care. The $35 billion in unclaimed funds is an annual US estimate for co-op plus MDF; the separate 60% figure is a quarterly unused rate — different measures, not the same number. And the 39%→62% adoption trend applies specifically to B2B software companies above $25 million in ARR, not to all firms.
Sources & references
Every figure in this piece links to the specific report or article it came from. Two are analyst/market research, one is a compiled-statistics set, one is an industry estimate, and three are vendor-published (ZINFI, Crossbeam and Tackle sell in this market — we flag that rather than hide it).
- LSA / MediaPost, via Fifty Five and Five — “Why your Marketing Development Funds aren’t generating pipeline” — up to ~$35B in co-op & MDF unclaimed annually (US)↗
- ZINFI Technologies — “Why Channel Partners Do Not Use Market Development Funds” — up to 60% of MDF unused per quarter (worldwide channel survey; vendor-published)↗
- Crossbeam (ELG Insider) — “When Sales and Partnerships Partner Up” — partner-influenced deals close ~28 days faster (attributed to Sendoso; vendor-published)↗
- Digital Applied — “Partner & Channel Marketing Statistics 2026” — PRM adoption 39%→62% among B2B software firms above $25M ARR↗
- SNS Insider — “Partner Relationship Management Market” — ~$1.27B (2023) to ~$4.14B (2032), ~13.9% CAGR↗
- Tackle — “State of Cloud Marketplaces” — software sold via AWS/Azure/Google Cloud marketplaces now in the tens of billions per year, growing double-digits (vendor-published)↗
- Future Market Insights — “Partner Relationship Management Market” — AI/ML features (partner scoring, predictive analytics) becoming standard in PRM↗