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Most channel partners don\u2019t have a marketing department, a marketing specialist, or even an outsourced marketing provider, and even if they do, these resources tend to operate not as marketing strategists, but more as vendor interface managers - handling multiple vendors and a variety of product lines. This is where a partner marketing concierge comes in.\nIt\xa0is fair to say that most channel partners don\u2019t really have the capabilities to execute vendors\u2019 marketing programs or even specific campaigns effectively. What\u2019s more, most channel partners don\u2019t receive enough market development funds (MDF) at the right time to hire dedicated resources for a specific campaign or program. While some large distributors and a few, very large channel partners may receive funding for certain marketing resources on an annual contract; this is more of an exception than the rule. It looks like an impossible dilemma, but there is an easy way around this: provide the channel with partner\xa0marketing concierge\xa0services in bite-sized chunks.\nSetting aside their lack of marketing resources, most channel partners don\u2019t even have any kind of marketing automation infrastructure to drive a flow of leads in a consistent fashion. As a result, most partners, if they do any kind of marketing at all, tend to default to running events from time to time, coupled with random email or telemarketing campaigns. When these don\u2019t produce leads or results, partners get frustrated with marketing and abandon their own efforts, as well as ceasing to engage on co-marketing efforts with vendors.\nOver the past decade - following the lead of larger organizations like HP, Cisco, IBM and other major players - mid sized IT vendors have also started providing marketing tools, campaigns, assets and collateral to their channel partners. However, lack of dedicated resources on the channel means that adoption of these assets is very rare. The only way to overcome this impasse is to provide\xa0partner marketing concierge\xa0services to the channel base as an add-on capability. While the first step in enabling channel partners should always be the introduction of an end-to-end integrated channel marketing automation platform, without the provision of additional marketing enablement services, for the most part the potential of these platforms remains unrealized.\nWhile top tier partners usually have access to market development funds (MDF) (please read our article\xa0What Can You Do to Drive Your Market Development Funds Utilization?), most do not take a strategic approach towards marketing. They tend to engage on transactional campaigns like email marketing or event marketing, which may work for small and medium deals but fail to deliver for higher value solution selling. We have recently seen some of the larger IT vendors starting to provide partner marketing managers to channel partners via their field organization, but this is not a scalable model above and beyond a handful of partners.\nSo, if your channel is doing 80% of their sales via 5-10% of your partner base, and the revenue generated per partner is in excess of a few million dollars per year, then dedicating marketing personnel to specific channel partners can provide ROI. However, that leaves hundreds or thousands of partners with no meaningful marketing support. (Further information is available in our article \u2013 How Partner Profiling Can Increase Your Channel Sales.\nOne resource-efficient way to resolve this issue is to provide outsourced\xa0partner marketing concierge\xa0services which partners can acquire on a temporary basis - say for a quarter or two - for an affordable, modest sum that could vary anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and is funded by vendor MDF. When a vendor aligns their market development funds (MDF) process behind such a concierge effort, they can create a menu-based marketing catalog, incorporating pre-approved campaigns and activities which partners can select and execute independently,