Two things usually happen next, and both are predictable.
In the first, you sign with someone promising national coverage, or who describes themselves as your US sales manager. They send optimistic monthly updates. Meetings are always happening. The pipeline stays empty. Eighteen months later you have learned nothing about the American market and have no customers to show for it.
In the second, you skip the distributor and go straight to a national retailer. You spend months on their compliance requirements, absorb their margin pressure, and carry the risk. Unless you are already at scale, the imbalance in power does the rest.
The underlying error is the same in both cases: you outsourced your market learning before you understood the market.
Why it fails so consistently
Three problems recur often enough to be treated as structural rather than bad luck.
Incentives point the wrong way. Your distributor earns on activity — meetings, demonstrations, presence — while you need outcomes. Those diverge quietly and early.
You lose visibility. Who are they talking to? What objections come up? What happened after the meeting? Without answers you cannot improve your proposition, which is the thing you actually came for.
Channel conflict arrives later. When roles are unclear and nobody has the full picture, the relationship deteriorates faster than the sales cycle completes.
You can own the economics, the data, and the customer relationship while other people sell for you. What you cannot do is hand over all three and expect to learn anything.
Prove it works directly, before you partner
Build the evidence a prospect — or a distributor’s prospect — can absorb in fifteen minutes.
One outcome line: in ninety days, this role reduced this metric by this much, worth this much a year. A three-minute demonstration showing your solution working inside the system they actually use. A two-page security overview covering architecture, data flow, access control, penetration-test status, and incident contacts.
This lowers risk for everyone and anchors the conversation in outcomes. It also stops you signing away exclusivity before you know whether anyone will buy.
One Danish industrial company spent eighteen months with a national distributor who produced no customers. When they built this evidence and began showing it directly, they closed three customers in ninety days — in a segment the distributor had said was not ready.
Trial the distributor. Do not marry them.
Instead of a two-year exclusive, run ninety days with terms written down.
One region or one vertical, non-exclusive, no sub-agents without approval. Targets that describe progress rather than effort: meetings with named target accounts, follow-up meetings booked within seventy-two hours, pilot agreements started with clear conversion triggers, security reviews requested. Your side of it: the evidence pack, help with messaging, and your presence on one webinar. Everything visible in a shared pipeline, reviewed for twenty minutes each week. Higher payment for orders than for pilots, with a bonus tied to conversion speed rather than activity. And an exit that triggers automatically if the targets are missed, so ending it requires no confrontation.
This surfaces the distributors who have genuine relationships rather than a map of the United States and a slide deck.
Three answers should end the conversation. We need exclusivity to justify investing in your product. We do not use a CRM. We will handle messaging and the security questions later.
Keep some customers direct
Hold direct relationships with key accounts even as distribution builds. Two reasons, both practical: you keep visibility into what is actually happening in the market, and you avoid concentration risk if the partner fails or drops you.
A workable set of rules looks like this. No exclusivity in the first year. Key accounts stay direct until you have two production references. One evidence pack and one shared view of the pipeline, with no parallel funnels. No exhibition stand unless twenty meetings with target accounts are booked before you travel. Quarterly reviews that measure meetings, next steps, pilots, and orders rather than promises.
What to do this week
Ask any prospective distributor for three meetings next week with named target accounts, and offer to join with your evidence pack. If they resist, you have your answer — quickly, and for the price of an email.
This is the kind of question we work through with clients before it becomes expensive. If it is live for you right now, that is the conversation to have.