Channel conflict: the distributor's side
Undercutting, territory friction, leads seen as competition — channel conflict shrinks when rates, handovers and schemes live on records both sides trust.
The lead that came back wearing another brand
The wound this page answers arrives as a story every distributor eventually tells: we sent our dealer a ready customer, and he sold him another brand. Around it cluster the channel's other frictions — the dealer undercutting his neighbour, the territory argument, the suspicion that your experience centre is competing with the very counters it feeds.
The useful reading is colder: channel conflict is almost always a structure problem wearing a loyalty costume — and structures can be fixed, while loyalty cannot be demanded.
Read as betrayal- The dealer sold another brand — to a customer you handed him
- Loyalty cannot be demanded — so the reading leads nowhere
Read as structure- A structure problem — wearing a loyalty costume
- Structures can be fixed — which is the whole of this page
One written trade price, or a hundred private wars
Undercutting between dealers is the child of private rates.
Where each dealer negotiates his own price in a hundred private phone calls, every difference eventually surfaces on a shared customer — and the cheaper dealer's advantage reads to the dearer one as your betrayal.
The practice: one written trade price list, dated, revisions to everyone the same morning, with volume rewarded through declared schemes rather than whispered rates.
One written trade price
Dated, with revisions reaching everyone the same morning. Dealers police a published structure themselves; they war over a secret one.
The handover on record
Dealer named, requirement attached — so the fate of a lead is discussable at review, kindly and factually.
Schemes that count
Volume alone feeds the biggest counter. Reward the display maintained, the new range stocked, the leads honoured.
Dealers police a published structure themselves; they war over a secret one.
The handover on record, so the fate is discussable
The diverted lead becomes manageable the day the handover stops being a phone call.
A lead passed on a record — dealer named, requirement attached — has a fate you can ask about at review, kindly and factually: of the leads we sent, these closed, these went quiet. No accusation is needed.
The pattern speaks, and the dealers who convert what they are handed earn more handing.
The channel learns that leads flow toward records — which is exactly the incentive you want.
Schemes that reward the behaviour you need
Volume-only schemes feed the biggest counter and starve the loyal one.
Reward beside volume the behaviours that grow the brand — the display maintained, the new range stocked, the leads honoured — and the scheme stops amplifying the conflict and starts paying for the partnership.
A scheme whose count both sides can see, while it runs, settles itself.
The record as the peace treaty
None of this makes dealers saints or asks them to be.
It makes the structure legible — rates published, handovers recorded, schemes countable — so the ordinary frictions of shared customers stop escalating into wars of suspicion. The mechanisms live on their pages:
Bring your worst channel story to a demo — and see which record would have kept it small.
Ask for a demo