from the BRAND side

Every list of where to look solves a problem nobody has. Finding candidates is easy; what goes wrong is what the search leaves you choosing between.The best distributor I met in one particular year was also the one who needed us least. At the time I took those for two separate observations about the same company. They were one observation, and it took me a long time to see it.Every guide to this..

The onboarding checklist closes in about three weeks. The working shape of the relationship is set over the same ninety days, by default, and it outlasts the contract.Onboarding a distribution partner has a visible half and an invisible half.The visible half is a list. Contract signed, first order placed, product data sent, logo files shared, a quarterly call put in the calendar. It takes about ..

Most distributor scorecards are borrowed from procurement. A partner can score full marks on every line and still be selling nothing.The scorecard came back green. On-time ordering, payment behaviour, forecast submission, responsiveness, documentation, complaint handling — all at or above target, four quarters running.The business was not moving.Nothing on that sheet was wrong. Every number was ..

Every brand with more than a handful of markets ranks them. Revenue goes into a column, the column gets sorted, and attention follows the sort. That is not a failure of management. It is management.The failure is what happens at the bottom of the list. A market small enough to skip is also small enough to forget, and the gap between "deprioritised" and "neglected" is not marked anywhere. You cro..

A distribution business can look healthy for a surprisingly long time while nothing is being sold.Shipments go out. Invoices get paid. The revenue line in your regional P&L grows. Then somewhere in the second year the reorders stop, and you discover the partner has been sitting on most of what you shipped since launch. Nobody lied. You were just reading the wrong number.Sell-in, sell-out, sell-t..

The sixth in a series on appointing and managing distribution partners, written from the brand side of the table.Bad-debt stories usually get told as stories about a bad partner. Mine is not one of those, and I think that is why it is worth telling.Nothing was going wrong when this started. It was one of our strongest markets, the business was growing, and the biggest annual sales event of that ..

A brand-side checklist from 22 years of appointing, contracting with, and occasionally replacing distributors across Asian markets.Most brands approach distributor selection as a ranking problem. Two or three candidates come in, each with a deck, and the brand tries to work out which company is better.It is the wrong question, and it usually produces a stalemate. Good distributors are good in di..