Sales leaders often wrestle with a fundamental go-to-market decision:
Do we build a direct sales team, or do we invest in an indirect reseller and agent channel?
I believe that for many B2B technology companies, the right answer is both.
Direct and indirect sales aren't competing strategies. They do different jobs.
A direct sales team can create early customer engagement, develop pipeline, validate target markets, uncover use cases, and produce the first wins that prove your product can sell.
An indirect channel gives you something much harder—and more expensive—to create with an internal sales team alone: scale.
The goal isn't to choose between them. It's to make them work together.
Direct Sales Is Your Intelligence Engine
Especially when you're launching a new product, you need people talking directly to customers.
Which customers are interested? Who is actually buying? Which use cases resonate? What objections keep coming up? How long does a deal take? What messaging gets someone's attention?
Your direct team answers those questions.
They also create something critically important when you're trying to recruit channel partners:
Proof that customers want your product.
You can build the best partner presentation in the world, but resellers and agents ultimately want to know one thing:
"Can I make money selling this?"
Early customer opportunities help answer that question.
Direct sales can therefore be the intelligence and demand-generation engine behind an emerging indirect channel.
But direct sales has a limitation: scale is expensive.
Every additional territory requires people, management, prospecting resources, tools, travel, benefits and time. Expanding coverage generally means expanding headcount.
An indirect channel changes that equation.
Indirect Sales Is Your Scaling Multiplier
A strong indirect channel gives you access to reseller, VAR, MSP, integrator and agent sales organizations that already have relationships with the customers you're trying to reach.
Instead of building every customer relationship yourself, you're enabling other sales organizations to take your product into relationships they already own.
That's where the leverage comes from.
But there's a mistake companies sometimes make when building this model.
They recruit partners and then wait for them to find customers.
I think you should do the opposite.
Bring Your Partners Opportunities
Here's where direct and indirect really come together.
When your direct team creates an opportunity, fulfill that opportunity through a channel partner whenever practical.
This is often where the CFO—or sometimes the sales leader—pushes back:
"Wait. We found the customer. We did the selling. Why the hell would we pay a reseller?"
Because you're not just paying them for this transaction.
You're investing in what happens after it.
Think of that first partner margin almost like marketing and channel-development spend.
Imagine approaching a reseller you're trying to recruit and saying:
"One of your customers wants to buy our product. We'd like them to buy it through you."
That's a pretty powerful recruitment pitch.
You've just eliminated one of the biggest risks partners face when taking on a new vendor: investing time learning a product without knowing whether they'll ever make any money from it.
Now they get to experience the entire process firsthand.
They learn how your product is positioned. They quote it. They transact it. They may help deploy or support it. Most importantly, they make money from it.
And something changes.
Your product is no longer another logo on their line card.
It's something they've successfully sold.
From One Opportunity to Many
This is where the investment can start compounding.
After completing that first transaction, the conversation with the partner becomes very different.
Instead of:
"We have a great product we'd like you to sell."
You can say:
"We just helped you sell our product to one of your customers. Who are the next five customers we should go after together?"
Now your direct team and your partner are working together.
Over time, the objective is to reverse the direction of opportunity flow.
Initially, you bring opportunities to the channel.
Eventually, the channel brings opportunities to you.
That's when the scaling multiplier starts working.
Don't Eliminate Direct Sales
Even with a mature indirect strategy, I believe companies should maintain direct sales relationships with their most important customers—even if that means having just one or two direct salespeople.
Your key accounts are too important to outsource completely. You want direct visibility into their needs, satisfaction, future plans and how your products are performing.
But having a direct relationship with a customer doesn't mean every transaction has to be direct.
That's the distinction.
Your direct organization can own customer strategy and demand creation while your channel provides fulfillment, services, reach and ultimately additional pipeline.
Direct sales generates demand and intelligence. Indirect sales creates reach, leverage and scale.
The strongest go-to-market model isn't necessarily direct or indirect.
It's knowing what each does best—and designing them to make each other stronger.