The channel decides in your place

A channel is not a pipe. A pipe carries without altering. A reseller, by contrast, re-broadcasts — in its own words, with its own trade-offs and its own interests, which are not yours.

This is the difference between selling and being sold.

The interest no one brings to the case

When an executive committee negotiates its listing, it discusses terms, volumes, exclusivities, marketing considerations. These are the right topics. One is missing, and it is the only structural one.

Your distributor has an active interest in your being replaceable.

This is not ill will, it is economics. A reseller that lists three comparable brands can play them off against one another, put them in competition, substitute one for another. If you become genuinely differentiated, it loses that latitude — it becomes dependent on you. Your differentiation is, quite literally, a cost to it.

You are therefore financing the diffusion of your message through a player whose model rests on its own effacement. This is not a malfunction of the relationship. It is the relationship. One figure gives the measure of it — drawn from large retail, but the mechanism is the same everywhere: according to France's Commission for the Review of Commercial Practices, 68% of private-label sales are produced by French micro-enterprises, SMEs and mid-market companies. In other words, thousands of companies manufacture, under a brand that is not their own, the interchangeability that commoditises them.

The mechanism, step by step

Take a case — it is a composite, but any industrial leader will recognise it: a pump manufacturer, 90 million euros in revenue, selling through a network of specialist distributors. The product is good, more robust than average, and the executive committee is convinced of it.

Step 1. The committee decides to move upmarket. The robustness justifies a premium, the market will bear it, the margin depends on it. Decision taken, offsite held, everyone nods in agreement.

Step 2. Marketing executes. New messaging, new materials, a promise: the pump that breaks down less often. The premium now exists — in the documents.

Step 3. The sales team executes too, but it is paid on volume. Its bonus depends on revenue, not on margin. So it sells what sells: it pushes volume, and concedes the discount that closes the deal. Marketing's premium and the sales bonus execute two different decisions — because the committee, in reality, made only one of them out loud, and left the other in the compensation plan.

Step 4. The distributor receives all of this. It lists three pump brands, yours among them. A customer asks it to compare. It has one minute, no reason to defend your premium — it is not its premium — and a clear interest in keeping the three options equivalent, because three equivalent options mean that it is the one who decides.

Step 5. So it simplifies. "Three good pumps, this one is a bit more expensive." Your superior robustness — the heart of your premium — becomes "a bit more expensive." The comparison is reframed onto the one axis where the three brands are comparable: price.

Step 6. The customer chooses on price. Not because your product is not worth more, but because the only person who could have explained that had an interest in not doing so.

The premium was decided in committee, written by marketing, contradicted by the sales bonus, and buried by the distributor — each playing its part faithfully. No one was at fault. The result is a commoditisation that the committee, if it looks at its discount rate, will attribute to "market pressure."

What the simulation reveals

Commoditisation is not the end of an inevitable chain. It is the meeting point between an ambiguity you emitted and an interest the channel exploited. Remove the ambiguity — genuinely decide between premium or volume, align the bonus with the decision — and the distributor no longer has any purchase: it can only simplify what was already blurred.

This is the finding of Chapter 3, playing out inside your own chain: faced with an ambiguous sender, the receiver decides, and it decides in its own favour. A committee that does not choose does not defer the decision. It delegates it to the party whose interest is the opposite.

And if you have no distributor

A leader who sells direct will read the above with relief. Wrongly: they have a channel, and they wrote it themselves.

Their sales force re-broadcasts exactly as the distributor does — same approximate words, same one minute, same choice of what closes. But the divergence of interest has a different origin, and that changes everything.

The distributor has an interest in your interchangeability by construction: it is its model, it cannot give it up, no amount of training will correct it. Your salesperson, by contrast, has no interest in commoditising you. They have an interest in hitting their target. And if that target is a volume, they will sell volume — whatever the committee's premium conviction, whatever the quality of the pitch, whatever their attachment to the company.

That divergence, you did not suffer it. You drafted it. It sits in Step 3 of the pump, and it sits in one line of your compensation plan — voted in committee, often by the very people who lament that the field does not defend the positioning.

A commission plan is not a motivation tool. It is the mandate you give your channel: the quantified, enforceable translation of the premium/volume trade-off that the committee never made. The only place in the company where that trade-off exists in written form is your salespeople's variable pay. They apply it. They are right to apply it.

With a distributor, the opposing interest is a given. With your own team, it is a decision — yours.

The approach

The channel falls under execution — are the channels aligned on impact / effort? —, one of the six components of the model's Go-To-Market lever. What you can review yourself: the mix of your references by distributor — a reseller that pushes only your entry-level range has rendered its verdict, readable from your own system. What the GTM NEXUS 360® approach observes on the outside: the public trace of your presence by channel, the coherence or dispersion of what is said about you depending on the point of contact. The gap between the two is the diagnosis.

The boundary

Taking back control of the channel does not remove the problem: it relocates it. Internalising distribution — direct sales, an owned network — means making your sales force the channel, and your sales force executes the mandate you wrote for it. You do not take back control of the emission by internalising. You take back control only of the mandate — which is useless if the mandate itself remains ambiguous.

The question, then, is not whether you should own your channel. It is whether you have decided what it should say — or whether you have let it decide for you.

Your channel decides because your committee did not. It remains to understand why it did not — and the answer is not that it lacks courage.