Article · Long-form article, about a 12 minute read

Direct Sales vs. Channel Sales: Choosing Your Route to Market in B2B SaaS

James Doman-Pipe · GTM Playbook Free Intermediate

This is the cleanest side-by-side we found on what you actually trade away going indirect: margin, customer contact, and control of the message. It is opinionated in a useful way, telling you not to reach for channel sales to paper over a direct motion that is not working yet. A good gut-check before you commit to partners.

  • Going indirect trades higher margin and direct customer feedback for reach into markets where partners already have relationships.
  • Partners sell what is easiest or highest-margin for them, so if that is not your product, a slide of logos generates little real revenue.
  • Channel sales makes sense when buyers prefer intermediaries or you need geographic reach without local hiring, not as a fix for a broken direct model.
Open on discover.gtmplaybook.co ↗

The question it answers

  1. When does it make sense to sell through resellers or partners instead of direct?

Read with it

  1. Ross and Lemkin are the people who wrote the sales-growth playbook most SaaS teams actually copy, so this is a solid grounding... Wiley Book · Book, roughly 350 pages From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
  2. Video · Talk, roughly 30 to 45 minutes Partner Ecosystems: Trends, Predictions and Forecast, with Jay McBain Jay McBain
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →