I have $62,000 of MDF from our distributor that expires 31 December and no plan for it. What can I realistically spend it on in 12 weeks that produces pipeline and not a pile of branded water bottles?
Spend it on one room. Twelve weeks is not long enough to build a campaign, and it is comfortably long enough to convene a single well-chosen gathering, which is the only format on that list whose output is a set of relationships rather than a receipt.
The call asking this always comes in the second week of October. Never September, when there would still be time to think, and never November, when the calendar has already decided. October, when the number is still large enough to matter and the weeks are still just numerous enough to pretend.
The person asking is rarely panicking. They are doing arithmetic out loud. Twelve weeks, one approval cycle, one vendor compliance review, one venue that will want a deposit. They know the shape of what is possible and they are hoping to be told something they have not considered.
Why does unspent money feel like a failure rather than a decision?
Because the programme measures spend rather than outcome, and the partner knows it.
Every mechanism around market development funds rewards the partner who submits the claim. The portal tracks utilisation. The quarterly review asks what percentage was deployed. The following year's allocation is set by a number that describes activity. Nobody has ever had their budget increased for handing money back with an explanation.
So the fear in the question is rational, and it is not really a fear of wasting sixty-two thousand dollars. It is a fear of a smaller number next year.
Worth separating the two, because they behave differently. A rushed activation that produces nothing damages the following year's conversation more thoroughly than an honest underspend does. The underspend is a line in a spreadsheet. The half-attended evening is a story the vendor's channel team tell each other, and the story travels considerably further than the line.
What is twelve weeks actually long enough to build?
One room, and very little else.
A campaign needs a running start, a message that has been tested somewhere cheaper, and enough repetitions for anyone to notice it. Twelve weeks buys the first repetition and then the quarter ends.
We have done it on rather less, though not comfortably. At Channel Partners last year we decided four weeks out to put together a deliberately relaxed evening, with guests brought in by four different partners who did not obviously belong in the same room. Four weeks is a tight run and nobody would choose it. It worked because the community was already there: each partner had people they could ring personally, and a personal call from someone a guest already trusts does more than six weeks of invitation design.
Every one of us left that evening with a warm list. More usefully, it has kept producing. Partners and clients have both come out of that room in the months since, which is not something any of us could have claimed about a webinar run in the same window.
Twelve weeks is the better hand, and anyone holding it should spend the extra eight on the guest list rather than on the production. But the constraint that actually binds is not the calendar. It is whether there is a community to draw on, and whether the people doing the inviting have relationships rather than lists. With those, a tight run is survivable. Without them, a generous one is not.
What if twelve weeks is genuinely not enough?
Then say so early, and spend the money on something that compounds rather than something that disappears.
The room is the best use of the budget, not the only defensible one. A firm without a community to draw on, or without anyone free to make thirty personal calls in October, should not attempt one on a deadline. An under-filled evening costs more than the money: it is remembered by the guests who did come, by the sponsor who co-funded it, and by the vendor deciding next year's allocation.
The alternatives worth considering are the ones with a life beyond December. A small body of content built around a question the market is actually asking, which keeps answering that question in March. A video capture session with the people in the business who know the most, which produces material for a year. Research the firm can publish and be known for. None of these fill a room, and all of them still exist in February, which is the test.
There is also the option nobody offers, which is to commit part of the budget now to something properly built for the first quarter, and to tell the vendor exactly that. A partner who returns with a plan rather than a claim form is having a different conversation from the one they fear.
Who has to approve the spend, and in what order?
Three parties, and the sequence matters more than most partners expect.
- The vendor's compliance function, which approves the category of spend. This is usually the quickest of the three and the one people worry about most. Vendors approve hosted events routinely. What they refuse is an invoice with no describable outcome attached to it.
- The vendor's channel or field marketing contact, who approves the substance. Bring this person in early rather than late. They carry a number of their own and a set of accounts they are trying to reach, so a partner who arrives with a room and offers them a seat in it is solving their problem rather than asking for their money.
- The people who will do the inviting, who approve nothing formally and decide everything. If the guest list depends on sales representatives who do not report to whoever holds the budget, then the money is committed and the attendance is not. That gap opens in week two, not in week eleven, and it is the single most common reason these evenings come apart.
Most partners work that list in the order written. The ones whose rooms fill work it backwards, starting with the third.
What does the vendor actually want to see in February?
An account of what happened, not a receipt. Receipts are what the process asks for, which is a different thing from what the relationship needs.
What holds up in February is short and specific: who was in the room, why those particular people, what was discussed that could not have been discussed on a call, and what followed. Conversations rather than leads. Named accounts rather than volumes. An honest note about what did not work, which costs nothing and buys a great deal of credibility.
That account is harder to produce than a badge-scan report and considerably more persuasive, because it is the only version of events a channel chief can repeat to their own leadership without having to defend it first.
What survives the quarter it was claimed in?
Whatever has people in it.
The branded water bottles in the original question do real work as an image. They stand for everything fully consumed at the moment of purchase: the spend clears, the items are distributed, and by February there is nothing left to point at. The alternative is not a more expensive object. It is an activity whose residue is other people.
A room leaves behind a guest list that is now a warm list, introductions that did not previously exist, a subject the group turned out to care about more than anyone predicted, and a reason to convene the same people again in March without starting from a standing position. None of that appears on the claim form. All of it appears in the following year's pipeline.
More on how MTMG thinks about this sits on the South — Revenue Growth Cycle page.
The budget expires on the thirty-first of December. The relationships built with it carry no expiry date at all, which is the whole argument for spending it carefully rather than quickly.
Tara Nelson
Tara co-founded MTMG and runs its partner community and events programme, including the In Good Company series. She spends most of her time on the unglamorous half of a good room: who is invited, who does the inviting, and what happens in the weeks afterwards. Connect on LinkedIn or meet the leadership team.