A Field Guide to Channel Strategy

Book excerpt: Building a route to market is fundamental to sales and survival. This book demystifies marketing channel strategy by focusing on how to do channel design and management. We provide practical tools and frameworks for key decisions and highlight the critical tradeoffs and pitfalls. Many channel strategies are built like the wood towers used in popular stacking games. You hope your tower is sturdy and strong. But over time, you may replace or add partners, add or subtract routes to market, and change your product lines - so your channel strategy must adapt in order to prevent your tower from collapsing or breaking apart. This Field Guide introduces you to the channels landscape, helps you understand your building block options, and unpacks the physics of adding and subtracting channel components, to give you the tools you need to keep your go-to-market strategy resilient, responsive, and a source of competitive advantage.