Turn Your Marketing Development Funds into Your #1 Growth Engine
Stop managing complex spreadsheets and start funding real results. Journeybee transforms your marketing development funds program from an administrative burden into a collaborative, high-return investment.
What Are Marketing Development Funds?
Marketing development funds (MDF) are funds a company offers to its channel partners—like resellers, distributors, and agencies—to co-finance marketing and sales activities. Think of it as a joint investment in growth. These funds are incredibly versatile and can be used for a wide range of partner-led initiatives, such as:
Events: Hosting local meet-ups, customer webinars, or sponsoring a booth at a major trade show.
Digital Marketing: Running targeted social media ad campaigns, SEO initiatives, or email marketing programs.
Content Creation: Developing joint case studies, blog posts, or videos that resonate with a local audience.
The Real Challenge of Managing Marketing Development Funds
Even the best marketing development funds program can create friction, frustrating the very partners it's meant to empower and leaving you with more questions than answers.
For the Channel Manager, the pain is real:
Key features:
- Lack of Clear ROI: The quarter ends, and you're unable to connect your MDF spend to a clear pipeline number. You know great work is being done, but proving it is another story.
- Time-Consuming Administration: You spend your days tracking proposals in spreadsheets and chasing partners for proof-of-performance, taking you away from high-impact strategic planning.
For your Partners, the experience is frustrating:
Key features:
- Complex Proposal Processes: They have a brilliant campaign idea, but a clunky, confusing application process stops them before they even start.
- Delayed Reimbursements: They run a successful event but wait months for reimbursement, hurting their cash flow and their enthusiasm for the next big idea.
Let's explore your
use cases together
It's Time to Move Beyond Spreadsheets
A dedicated platform doesn't just improve your old process—it transforms it. Here's a quick comparison of the old way versus the new way.
ROI Tracking
Spreadsheets & Email: Manual, disconnected, and nearly impossible to prove. The Unified Platform: Automated, real-time, and directly connected to your CRM data.
Partner Experience
Spreadsheets & Email: Frustrating, slow, and confusing. Partners avoid it. The Unified Platform: Simple, transparent, and engaging. Partners actually like it.
Approval Process
Spreadsheets & Email: Chaotic, untraceable email chains where requests get lost. The Unified Platform: Structured, automated workflows with clear status updates.
Budget Management
Spreadsheets & Email: Outdated numbers with a high risk of accidental overspending. The Unified Platform: A live, single source of truth for all committed and available funds.
Audit Trail
Spreadsheets & Email: Non-existent. It's a scramble to find who approved what. The Unified Platform: A complete, time-stamped record of every action and approval.
Campaign Performance Tracking
Spreadsheets & Email: No visibility into campaign performance. Results arrive weeks late. The Unified Platform: Real-time dashboards tracking leads and revenue from each campaign.
From Complex Process to Your Strategic Advantage
Journeybee is the unified platform designed to bring sanity, strategy, and transparency to your entire MDF process. It's not just another portal; it's a collaborative engine that connects your marketing goals with your partners' real-world activities, making it easy for them to participate and simple for you to measure what matters.
An MDF Proposal Process Partners Actually Like
Instead of messy emails, partners use a simple form to pitch their marketing ideas, like a "Co-branded Webinar," with all the key details you need from the get-go.
Everyone stays in the loop with automatic status updates, so partners know the second their proposal moves from "Pending Review" to "Approved."
You see all incoming requests in one clean dashboard, making it easy to comment on a partner's plan or give it the green light with a single click.
MDF Claims and Payouts in Days, Not Months
Partners get paid faster by simply uploading their receipts and proof of work, like an attendee list from a trade show, right to the approved activity.
The system automatically checks the claim against what was originally approved, flagging any issues for you, like if an invoice is higher than the budget.
Since the system does the boring validation work for you, you can just review the proof and approve the payout in seconds, getting partners their money that much faster.
MDF Budgets and ROI You Can Finally Understand
You can easily set your main budget and then assign funds to different regions or partner tiers, like giving your "Gold" partners a bit more to work with.
A live dashboard gives you a bird's-eye view of your money, showing you exactly what's been committed, what's been paid, and what you have left to spend.
By connecting to your CRM, the system shows you what's actually working, tying every dollar spent to the leads and deals it generated—so you can see the real ROI of that $5,000 webinar.
How It Works in Simple Steps
Your Entire MDF Workflow in 3 Simple Steps
STEP 1
Propose & Approve
Partners use guided templates to submit their best ideas. You review and approve with a single click.
STEP 2
Execute & Claim
Partners run their campaigns and easily upload invoices and proof-of-performance directly to the approved activity.
STEP 3
Measure & Optimise
The platform automatically connects MDF spending to the leads and pipeline generated in your CRM, giving you a clear report on what's working.
Industries Thriving with Marketing Development Funds
Marketing development funds are essential for any industry that relies on an indirect sales channel. Key industries include:
Technology & IT
To help resellers (VARs) and service providers (MSPs) pay for local marketing like webinars and digital ad campaigns.
Manufacturing
To support independent dealers and distributors with funds for showroom promotions and regional trade shows.
Telecommunications
To enable local agents to run promotions and sponsor events to win against local competitors.
Financial Services & Insurance
So parent companies can help independent agents and brokers fund financial planning seminars.
Franchise Models
Where franchisors provide matching funds to franchisees for their hyper-local store marketing.
Trusted by Leading Channel TeamsReal Results from Real Customers
“At the end of every quarter, it took me a full week to manually try and connect our MDF spend to pipeline data in Salesforce. Now it happens automatically, and I can actually see which partners are driving real ROI.”
“We used to wait 90 days to get reimbursed for MDF, which was a huge strain on our cash flow. With Journeybee, we submit proof of performance digitally and get paid in under two weeks. It's completely changed how we invest in marketing.”
“Our MDF program used to be a black box of spending with no accountability. Now we can see exactly which campaigns generate pipeline, and our partners love the self-service portal. MDF went from a headache to a strategic growth lever.”
Frequently Asked Questions about Journeybee MDF
Our MDF solution is natively integrated into our complete Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform. This means your MDF data doesn't live on an island. It's connected to your deal registration, partner training (LMS), and performance data, giving you a true 360-degree view of your channel's ROI and providing a single, seamless portal for your partners.
Partner adoption is at the core of our design. We built it by focusing on and removing the biggest partner frustrations: clunky forms and slow payments. With a simple proposal process, real-time status tracking, and fast reimbursements, the platform makes your partners' lives easier. When a tool saves them time and improves their cash flow, they want to use it.
Yes. The platform is built for global channel programs. You can manage budgets, proposals, and claims in multiple currencies, and the partner-facing portal can be configured in multiple languages to provide a local, user-friendly experience for everyone in your network.
Through our deep integration with your CRM (like Salesforce), the platform creates a closed-loop system. When a partner runs an MDF-funded campaign, they can tag the leads or deals generated from that specific activity. Our platform then automatically pulls that pipeline and revenue data from your CRM and attributes it directly to the initial MDF investment, giving you a clear, data-driven report on performance.
Absolutely. This is a key part of strategic MDF management. You can easily create and allocate unique budgets for your Gold, Silver, and Bronze partners, or for specific regions and markets. You can also customise approval workflows—for example, giving your top-tier partners a more streamlined, fast-track approval process.
Our platform is designed for quick configuration, not a long, complex implementation. Our customer success team works with you to define your specific proposal, approval, and claims workflows. Most of our customers are up and running in a matter of weeks, not months.
Yes. Our platform includes a powerful Incentive Calculation Engine. This allows you to manage your entire channel incentive program in one place. You can use it to automate the calculation and payout of sales commissions, SPIFFs, and performance rebates right alongside your marketing development funds.