You’ve already spent your marketing budget. Your CFO isn’t releasing any more. You’ve got campaigns people are pressuring you to run, you’ve content you need to create, a pipeline that needs feeding and apparently no money to do any of it.
Before you accept that as the final answer, let us ask you one question.
Have you checked your Co-op?
Not whether your company earns Co-op. Most mid-sized MSPs do. The question is whether you, the person responsible for marketing, actually knows what’s sitting there right now?
Because here’s what we know happens inside a lot of MSPs. Co-op accrues in Partner Center. The funding exists. And unless someone is actively watching it, it quietly expires. Unclaimed. Unspent. Gone.
That someone watching it could be you (but typically, in many Microsoft MPSs, it isn’t).
Nobody’s looking after Co-op. Find out if that’s the case in your company.
Co-op tends to sit with whoever manages the Partner Portal. That might be your CEO. It might be an ops lead or an alliance manager. It might be someone in finance who thinks of it as a rebate rather than a marketing budget.
Sadly, what it usually isn’t is you, the marketer.
Which means the money is sitting in a system you may not have access to, being managed by someone who isn’t thinking about demand generation, content campaigns or pipeline, and potentially being spent on designation fees and training costs that eat the whole pot before growth marketing gets a look in.
That’s not a criticism of how your company operates. It’s just how we’ve found a lot of Microsoft Partners tend to work. To be fair, Co-op is genuinely opaque. The rules feel complicated. And if it doesn’t land on your desk, it’s hard to know where to go looking for it.
But it is a budget. And it could be YOUR budget, if you make the case for it.
Here’s what’s probably happening to your Co-op right now
From our experience, there are broadly three patterns happening with Co-op, and it’s likely you’ll recognise at least one of them.
The first: (if you have it and know about it) the money gets absorbed by partner programme costs — designation fees, training, programme participation. All legitimate. All Co-op claimable. But nothing left for marketing.
The second: someone notices with five or six weeks to go that there’s a balance sitting there and panics. Spends it on anything that qualifies quickly enough. Pay-per-click. A one-off event sponsorship. Something, anything, before the window closes. They get compliance. Sadly, you don’t get a campaign.
The third: (and this is more common than anyone in the ecosystem would freely admit) nobody claims it. The pot expires. The money disappears.
If you’re not sure which of these applies to your company, that’s a problem worth solving today.
Read our blog: Microsoft Co-op funding: why so much of it gets left on the table.
This is your budget conversation to have
So, you know you can’t magic more money out of your CFO. But if your company has Co-op available (and if you’re working in a mid-sized MSP, there’s a reasonable chance it does) that is a potential budget you can tap into.
In some cases, we’re talking £15,000 to £40,000 in a single half. That’s enough to fund a flagship content asset, supporting blogs, a landing page, and amplification. A proper demand generation campaign, not a scatter of one-off activities.
The catch is that Co-op works in six-monthly cycles, and the clock is always running. You earn in one half, you spend in the next. Anything unclaimed at the deadline expires. There’s no rollover. Which means the sooner you know what you’ve got, the more you can do with it.
Read our blog: What Microsoft Co-op funding is actually for (and what it isn’t).
So go find out
This week, have the conversation internally. Find out who has access to Partner Center. Ask whether there’s a Co-op balance, what period it covers, and when the claim deadline falls (usually six weeks after H1 or H2 ends).
You may find you’ve got more time than you think. Depending on when you’re reading this, you may find you’re already into month four of your six-month spend window and need to move quickly. Either way, knowing is better than not knowing.
In some cases, clients we work with benefit from bringing in a specialist to do a proper Partner Center audit. This doesn’t just cover the Co-op balance, but whether you’re accessing all the incentives you’re entitled to (yes, that means there may be more money may be available). Unused funds are more common than anyone would like to admit, and an audit can surface money that nobody knew was on the table. We work with Partner Center specialists both here in the UK and Stateside that we can introduce you to, if you need that kind of help.
Once you’ve found it, invest it (don’t just spend it)
If you do find funds available, resist the temptation to just spend it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating Co-op like a use-it-or-lose-it voucher — grabbing whatever qualifies quickly enough to hit the deadline. That’s how budgets get wasted on activities that stop working the moment the claim window closes.
There’s a version of Co-op that’s essentially recycling. Activities that qualify, get claimed, then stop working the moment the period closes. Ads. Events. Things that reset every cycle.
Then there’s a version that builds something.
Content that keeps working after the claim is submitted. A flagship guide behind a lead capture page. Case studies that become credibility anchors in your proposals. Blogs that build long-tail visibility for months and years.
The difference is this: activities reset. Assets accumulate.
When Co-op is invested in the right content, structured to be claimable, it pays for itself — and then keeps delivering long after the window closes. That’s a conversation worth having, once you’ve found out what you’ve got available.
When you have, let’s talk.
