Working the Channel
Almost nothing you quote is yours. Who sits between you and the vendor decides what you can propose and whether the deal makes money.
This is the layer that is completely invisible from inside an enterprise software career, and decisive from inside an MSP or reseller. There, you sold your own employer's product. Here you sell other companies' products, bought through a third company, at a price that depends on relationships you did not negotiate and cannot see on the quote sheet. People crossing into this discipline routinely spend a year not knowing this layer exists, and design solutions that are technically right and commercially unsellable.
The chain
| Link | What they do | What you need from them |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Builds the product, sets list price, runs the partner programme, employs channel/partner Sales Engineers | Design validation, competitive positioning, evaluation licences or loan hardware, and approval for non‑standard pricing |
| Distributor (sometimes "VAD" — value‑added distributor) | Buys in volume, carries stock and credit, administers deal registration, runs a licensing desk, and often provides pre‑sales design help. Global names include Ingram Micro, TD SYNNEX, Westcon/ComStor and Exclusive Networks; most markets also have strong regional players (Dicker Data in Australia, for instance) | Verified licensing, deal registration, pricing, and design help on products you don't touch often |
| Partner (your employer) | Holds the partner tier, the certifications, the distributor relationships and the rebate entitlements | To know which of those you actually have before you propose something |
| You | Decide what gets proposed | To decide it inside the commercial reality of the three rows above |
The line card decides what you can sell
No distributor carries every vendor, and no partner has a relationship with every distributor. The practical consequence is blunt: which firewall you can propose depends on who your employer buys through. A technically superior product that sits outside your line card and your partner tier arrives with worse pricing, slower support escalation, no rebate, and nobody internally who is certified on it. Recommending it anyway is not rigour — it is a scope your own delivery team can't support at a price your own company can't win with.
This is also why "why did you propose that one?" sometimes has a commercial answer, and why it is entirely legitimate to give that answer internally. It is not legitimate to give it to the customer as though it were a technical one.
Deal registration, and why early beats good
You register a named opportunity with the vendor or the distributor before you quote it. Two things happen: you get a better buy price locked to you for that specific deal, and other partners are blocked from quoting the same customer the same product at the same advantage. The mechanics vary by vendor; the pattern doesn't:
- First in usually holds it. Registration is frequently awarded on order of arrival, not on merit or relationship. A deal you have been working for six weeks can be registered out from under you by a partner who heard about it on Tuesday.
- Registrations expire. A long cycle can outlive its own registration. Somebody has to be watching the date, and on a small team that somebody is often you.
- An unregistered quote is a quote at a disadvantage. The way most people learn this is losing a deal by a margin that exactly matches the discount they didn't have.
The licensing desk exists because licensing is a black art
Every serious distributor runs one, and using it is the professional posture rather than an admission of weakness. The bar is not knowing every SKU and entitlement interaction — nobody does, and the ones that change quarterly are precisely the ones that cost money. The bar is knowing the shape of the licensing, then having the desk verify it before the number leaves the building. See the warning in Module 14: a licensing line got wrong is one of the few pre‑sales errors that turns a won deal into a loss‑making one.
Rebates, MDF and special bids — the money you can't see on the quote
- Rebate: money the vendor pays back for hitting volume, certification or growth targets. It doesn't appear on the deal, and it can be the difference between a thin deal and a good one.
- MDF (market development funds): vendor money for marketing, events, assessments or workshops. Frequently underused, and often available to fund exactly the kind of paid assessment that starts a pipeline.
- Special bid / deal price agreement: a one‑off approved buy price for a named opportunity, usually where the vendor wants a competitive displacement badly enough to fund it. Someone has to ask, and the person who knows early enough that the deal is genuinely competitive is usually pre‑sales.
Ask your commercial team once, early, which vendors pay what and on which products. It will legitimately change what you recommend at the margin, and not knowing means you are making that choice anyway — just blindly.
The vendor's own Sales Engineer is free, and under‑used
Most vendors employ channel or partner SEs whose entire job is helping partners win with their product. They are generally delighted to be called, and new pre‑sales people almost never call them because asking feels like admitting you don't know something. Experienced ones call them on the second deal.