How Atlassian Runs Partner Events That Close Deals
The partner event framework Atlassian uses to turn attendance into attributable pipeline.
How Atlassian Runs Partner Events That Actually Close Deals
Ten years of Atlassian partner marketing distilled into five plays — from Porsche racetracks to Salesforce attribution.
Based on insights from Austin Burningham Americas Partner Marketing Manager Team Lead, Atlassian Listen to Episode →
The Playbook:
Most partner event programs are built around what's easy to execute, not what actually moves pipeline. You pick a venue, send invites, collect badges, and hope something sticks. Austin Burningham has spent 10 years at Atlassian building something different — a partner event engine that's evolved from filling movie theaters to running one-to-one customer site visits with Porsche racetracks as the close.
The throughline isn't the budget or the venue. It's the discipline: ICP-first thinking, sales alignment baked in before the event goes live, and attribution tied directly to deal registrations and closed bookings. These aren't tactics. They're a program architecture.
Here are the plays.
Play #1: Treat Webinars as Mid-Funnel, Not Top-of-Funnel
"80% of customers are attending the webinar before they decide to make a purchase. So it really is a platform where people are able to casually come in, ask some fact-finding questions to really see if this is a solution that they want to pursue."
The takeaway: Webinars aren't awareness plays. They're the step buyers take right before they decide to engage for real.
Partner marketers often treat webinars as top-of-funnel because they're cheap and scalable. That's the wrong frame. Austin's data at Atlassian tells a different story: 80% of customers attend a webinar before making a purchase decision. That makes webinars a mid-funnel qualification tool — a place where buyers do their fact-finding and validate whether this is worth pursuing further.
The practical implication is that your webinar content and follow-up motion need to reflect that position. These aren't cold audiences. They're warm, evaluating, and ready for a next step if you give them one.
Austin also flagged a structural advantage that gets overlooked: webinars let you record content in advance, do edits before publishing, and add a live Q&A at the end. For partners who struggle with live production, this format reduces the barrier while keeping the experience interactive.
Why it matters for partner marketers: If you're treating webinars as brand plays and measuring registration volume, you're misreading the signal. The follow-up motion after a webinar should be designed for buyers in evaluation mode — not for leads at the top of a nurture sequence.
Tactical Move:
Segment webinar attendees immediately post-event by engagement level (attended live vs. watched recording vs. asked questions)
Build a separate follow-up track for Q&A participants — they've self-identified as active evaluators
Coordinate with partner sales reps before the webinar so they know which accounts are registered
Play #2: Save Executive Roundtables for Accounts You're Ready to Close
"We see these executive roundtables as a bottom of funnel activity where if we have maybe a customer or a handful of customers that we really want to convert, we're going to find out where they are and go to them."
The takeaway: Roundtables aren't a different version of a webinar — they're a close motion. Treat them accordingly.
The distinction Austin draws is precise: webinars find and qualify buyers wherever they are. Roundtables are targeted at specific accounts the partner is already trying to close. Different moment in the buying journey. Completely different execution playbook.
This framing changes everything about how you plan the event. The guest list is curated around a handful of target accounts, not maximized for attendance. The location is chosen based on where those specific customers are. The customer speaker is chosen because they share challenges with the prospects in the room — not because they're easy to get on stage.
The format also solves a problem Austin surfaced about customer speakers: legal teams often won't approve recorded video testimonials because the content might age poorly. But getting a customer to speak live, unrecorded, at an in-person event? That's an easier lift. The relationship does the work.
Why it matters for partner marketers: Mixing your event types — using roundtables as a volume play or running webinars at accounts you're trying to close — wastes budget and dilutes both motions. Map your event format to your funnel stage and you'll spend less while closing more.
Tactical Move:
Identify 3–5 target accounts per quarter that are late-stage and build your roundtable calendar around them
Let the partner drive the customer speaker ask — they have the relationship, and Austin's team at Atlassian finds partners more successful at this than the vendor
If budget allows, cover customer travel costs. Austin's team does this specifically because it "greases the wheels" for legal and PR approval.
Play #3: If the Event Doesn't Excite Your AEs, It Won't Work
"I kind of find it has to be more than just a dinner to get both the customers and the Atlassian account executives excited."
The takeaway: Your sales team is a co-audience. Design events that make them want to show up, and they'll bring their accounts with them.
Austin's team doesn't just plan events for customers. They plan events that AEs actively want to attend — because an excited AE is your best distribution channel. When the event is compelling enough, account executives on the Atlassian side will personally work to get their customers there, because they want to be there too.
This creates a flywheel. Partner funds the event, Atlassian AEs drive attendance from their accounts, the partner gets direct access to decision-makers they'd struggle to reach cold, and the AE gets face time in a low-pressure setting. Everyone has skin in the game.
Austin's team has funded a Porsche racetrack rental in Atlanta (17 cars), NFL suites, a San Francisco Giants game, and partner customer days at F1 races through Atlassian's Williams F1 sponsorship. The criteria is consistent: would this pull someone away from their family on a Friday? If not, rethink it.
Why it matters for partner marketers: If you're running events your sales team feels neutral about, you're leaving your best activation lever on the table. AE enthusiasm is a forcing function for customer attendance. Build it into the program design, not as an afterthought.
Tactical Move:
Before finalizing any event format, gut-check it with one or two AEs: "Would you want to come to this even if you had no customers to bring?"
Involve partners in ideation early — Austin's team asks partners to bring unique ideas, not just execute on a template
Present the event to Atlassian sellers only after venue, budget, and customer speaker are confirmed — never before you have the full picture
Play #4: Attribution Has to Be Built Before the Event, Not After
"For every event that we run, we have a record in Salesforce for that activity... anytime a partner opens up a deal registration, we're able to track and basically match if that deal registration matches one of those domains."
The takeaway: If you're not setting up the tracking before the event runs, you can't claim the pipeline credit afterward.
Austin's attribution model is worth studying closely. Every event gets a Salesforce record before it runs. Post-event, a list of attendee domains gets uploaded. For the next nine months, any deal registration from those domains is automatically matched back to that event. If the same account touched five marketing activities, each one gets an equal share of the pipeline value — in his example, five events splitting a million-dollar deal registration means $200K of attributed influence per activity.
It's a multi-touch model built into Salesforce and visualized in Tableau. It doesn't require a point solution. It requires discipline in how you set up the record before the event and consistency in uploading the domain list after.
This kind of reporting is what allows partner marketing to defend MDF spend, demonstrate influence on closed bookings, and have a credible conversation with finance about program value.
Why it matters for partner marketers: Attribution is the MDF conversation you'll have with leadership every quarter. If you can't show pipeline influence per activity, you're arguing from anecdote. Austin's model gives you a number — tied to deal registrations and closed bookings — that survives budget review.
Tactical Move:
Create the Salesforce activity record at the time you book the event, not after it runs
Upload the attendee domain list within 48 hours of the event ending — delays break the attribution window
Track both pipeline influenced and closed bookings so you have two data points, not one
Play #5: The Future of Partner Events Is One-to-One
"We're starting to see more recently is partners doing one-to-one customer site visits... the deal is so important that the partner is going to go to them directly."
The takeaway: The direction partner events are heading is smaller, more targeted, and built around specific deals — not audiences.
Austin has watched the event pendulum swing twice in his 10 years at Atlassian: from 100-person in-person events to virtual webinars at scale, and now toward hyper-targeted, one-to-one formats. The most recent trend he's seeing is partners showing up at the customer's office with a presentation, then taking them to a game or experience afterward. The experience is the reward for attending. The meeting is the actual goal.
The logic is simple: if the deal is big enough, you stop trying to get the customer to come to you. You go to them. You give them everything they need to make a decision, on their turf, on their timeline. And you make it worth their while.
This isn't accessible to every partner at every deal size. But it signals where the upper end of partner-led sales motions is moving — and it has implications for how partner marketers should be thinking about event tiers. Not every event needs to scale to be worth funding.
Why it matters for partner marketers: Your event portfolio needs tiers that match deal size. Large webinars for broad qualification, roundtables for late-stage clusters, and one-to-one experiences for the deals that can't afford to lose. MDF should follow that logic — not be distributed equally across all three.
Tactical Move:
Define thresholds with your partners: at what deal size does it make sense to run a one-to-one site visit?
Build a simple playbook for partners on how to structure the one-to-one format: pre-meeting materials, presentation agenda, post-meeting follow-up
Tie these investments to deal registration so the attribution model captures the influence correctly