War-game a co-marketing fund before eligibility rules, receipt standards, and clawback paths harden into how every partner spends shared dollars.
Co-marketing funds fail when eligibility lives in a slide, when receipts are optional after the first payout, when clawbacks have no owner, and when success is measured as dollars spent rather than attributed pipeline that finance can reproduce. A friendly partner kickoff is not evidence.
Lock the fund rules
State the partner tiers that qualify, the spend categories allowed, the receipt and proof standards, the clawback triggers, the attribution window, and who can deny a claim. Attach sample claims from the last two quarters, dispute outcomes, and the kill criteria if spend outruns verified leads. If partner marketing, finance, and channel sales disagree on what counts as proof, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any payout path lacks a receipt rule or a named deny owner.
Where the fund breaks
- Eligibility fiction: tiers that look exclusive and quietly include everyone who asks.
- Receipt theater: screenshots without invoices, or invoices without campaign IDs.
- Clawback blur: refund language that no one has authority to enforce.
- Dual credit: partner and internal teams both claim the same opportunity.
- False velocity: spend celebrated while attributed pipeline stays unmeasured.
Optional legal seat if brand claims or regulated offers sit in the fund. Optional finance seat if clawbacks affect recognized revenue.
Run the fund through adversarial passes
Feed Pingpong the draft fund memo, claim samples, and open risk list. Early passes steelman the eligibility grid. Later passes attack from partner marketing, finance, channel sales, and legal seats. End with a pass that turns surviving objections into fewer payout paths, clearer deny owners, or a hold. Delete invented "partners always submit clean receipts" claims and dual-counted pipeline.
Ask finance and partner marketing seats to price the spend behavior the fund will create. If sales language promises fast reimbursement while finance still needs a campaign ID that the form does not collect, partners will learn the process is theater. Write the intended claim path, the escalation for disputed spend, and the categories you will refuse to fund, then attack whether growth still happens under that discipline.
Force a quarter-after narrative: what happens if a top partner submits late receipts, if a campaign underperforms while the fund is already spent, or if attribution windows overlap with an internal launch. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the fund before the next cohort opens. Related: pretend you are the partner marketing lead, war-game a partner margin grid, stress-test an affiliate disclosure rule, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.