[gogopuppygogo]

Great summary on sales and marketing but neither is a monolith.

Sales can best be distinguished by indirect sales and direct sales.

Direct sales is where you go out and find clients.

Indirect sales is where you go out and find partners to bring you clients.

You don’t buy Coca Cola from Coca Cola. You rarely by HP from HP.

Companies tend to be more successful when they find ways to grow using “channels”.

This is a good summary of finding your path toward channel sales:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297479

This is a good kit to start a channel sales program:

https://chanimaluniversity.com/product/reseller-program-kit-...

[blueblisters]

Has anyone had success doing B2B SaaS sales using cloud marketplaces like AWS marketplace, GCP marketplace, Azure, etc.? I wonder if that qualifies as "channel sales".

[lmeyerov]

IMO, they are failing to be good distribution channels overall, but as currently done, can be a nice vehicle for early POC/trialing phases.

Good distribution channels solve three aspects:

- Logistics: Technical delivery - pretty good, as it's cloud as usual, with the bonus of solving how to run on the customer's side of the trust boundary (vs. normal centralized saas), + pricing features like app-defined utility fees

- Marketing: Cloud marketplaces fail to do demand gen (low-traffic search, no promotional campaigns, ...), as opposed to engaged partners who will

- Sales: Trialing is better than an on-prem thing but they harm success by not having a person involved nor allowing you to know who your users are, so overall, hurt closing. They are good-ish on solving procurement/invoicing

So again, pretty bad as an overall distribution channel, but for handling the paid POCs of a sales/marketing pipeline defined elsewhere, they can be nice.

Long-term, I think these can be massive, but they're currently immature/underinvested/etc. Ex: hw fee + 20-30% sw fees for such a poor distribution channel is quite unattractive for most serious b2b partners (distribution partners normally take 5-15% and do much more work, not ~50% for so little), so looks like a symptom of PM fiefdom politics vs senior leadership investing in these to be big. They could take Stripe's 1-3% payments fees, add 5% hands-off reseller fee, opt-in for special programs for another 5%, and poof, multiple $B businesses.

[pilooch]

I did a bit with instances of an Open Source deep learning server of mine, for three years+ now. Made up to 1.5k/month, lower now but it's on my plate to revive it. It's provided side money to our service/ software business.

Keep in mind there's a 30% cut from AWS, plus if you're in the EU, you need a tier like payoneer to channel your revenues back into the EU.

[gogopuppygogo]

I think any third party taking a margin off your sale to help facilitate the transaction constitutes a channel.

[nikitaga]

Stripe isn't a channel though. The third party in question needs to actually do some work to bring you traffic / leads, not just do the mechanics of processing the transaction.