Direct vs. Indirect Sales: When Channel Sales Wins

If you need revenue quickly, building a partner program may not be your fastest route.

A direct sales team gives you control. Your reps carry your message, you hear buyer objections firsthand, and you decide exactly how each opportunity moves through the pipeline.

Indirect sales makes a different trade.

It takes time to recruit partners, enable them, build trust, and give them a reason to prioritize your product. But once the model works, those partners can give you selling capacity and customer relationships that would be expensive to recreate with your own headcount.

That distinction matters because the direct-vs.-indirect sales decision is often framed as if one model must beat the other.

Eric Braswell, a longtime sales and channel leader who has built and managed partner motions across multiple technology industries, sees it differently.

His shorthand is useful:

For speed, direct. For long-term scale, indirect. In many businesses, build both.

That doesn't mean channel sales automatically outperforms an internal sales organization. It means indirect sales can create a different kind of leverage—if the partners, economics, market and operating rules actually fit.

Direct vs. indirect sales: what's the real difference?

In a direct sales model, your company owns the customer relationship and sales process. Your internal team prospects, qualifies, demonstrates, negotiates, and closes.

In an indirect sales model, another organization participates in bringing your product to the customer. Depending on the model, that might be a reseller, consultant, systems integrator, broker, referral partner, or another member of your ecosystem.

The trade-off is bigger than who sends the contract.

Neither model wins every row.

The question is which trade-offs matter most in the market you are trying to reach.

Direct sales usually wins when speed and control matter most

If you are building a GTM motion from scratch and need bookings quickly, Braswell's preference is direct.

There is a practical reason for that.

Before an external organization can sell your product effectively, you need to find the partner, agree on economics, train them, build trust, and help them learn how to position the product. And even then, your product is only one of the things competing for that partner's attention.

An internal salesperson starts with a very different incentive structure: selling your product is their job.

Direct also gives you a much tighter learning loop. When the positioning misses, your team hears it. When buyers keep asking the same question, the information stays inside the company. When the sales process needs to change, you can change it without retraining an external network.

That makes direct sales particularly valuable while a company is still figuring out how customers actually buy.

But there is another reason to keep direct sales even after a partner ecosystem develops: some customers simply want a direct relationship.

Braswell has found this especially relevant at the largest end of B2B. A Fortune 100 buyer, for example, may expect direct access to the software company or manufacturer rather than having another organization inserted between them.

The deal is large enough, strategic enough and complex enough that the direct relationship itself carries value.

That doesn't mean partners disappear from enterprise deals. Systems integrators, consultants and technology partners can still influence or support them. It means the vendor may need to remain directly involved in the commercial relationship.

Indirect sales wins differently: by multiplying reach

Indirect sales gets interesting when you stop thinking about partners as individual sellers and start thinking about them as existing distribution networks.

Suppose you recruit one productive partner with ten sellers.

You have gained potential access to ten people carrying customer relationships without hiring ten additional reps yourself.

Recruit ten comparable partners and the theoretical reach becomes much larger.

That is the scale argument Braswell makes from his own channel experience. Across the programs he has built or inherited, he says he has repeatedly seen partner-generated revenue grow until it exceeded direct-sourced revenue.

That is an experience-based observation, not a promise that every partner program will follow the same trajectory.

But the broader technology market shows why channel strategy matters. Canalys/Omdia estimated that just over 70% of global IT spending in 2025 was partner-delivered.

The important part isn't simply the size of that number. It is what sits underneath it.

Partners already have things vendors would otherwise have to build:

• customer relationships

• local or vertical knowledge

• sales capacity

• technical expertise

• implementation capabilities

• complementary products and services

• credibility with particular buyers

A vendor does not need to reproduce all of that internally if the right partner already has it.

The real advantage is often trust, not distribution

Headcount math explains part of channel scale.

It doesn't explain why the customer chooses to listen.

Braswell sees the trusted advisor relationship as central to indirect sales.

A good channel partner isn't simply a middleman forwarding a software contract. The partner may already help the customer make decisions across several technology categories. They know the business, understand its environment and have built credibility long before your company arrives.

This can be especially valuable in the mid-market and SMB segments, where buyers may rely heavily on consultants, integrators, agencies or service providers to help them navigate purchasing decisions.

The partner is effectively lending some of that existing trust to the vendor.

But trust works in both directions.

When a reseller recommends your software, their own reputation is now attached to the outcome. If the product fails or the vendor handles the customer poorly, the partner's relationship is at risk too.

That is why recruitment volume is a poor measure of whether a partner program is healthy.

A logo on a partner page doesn't mean anyone is selling.

Don't recruit 400 partners. Find the first 5–10 that can work.

Braswell's advice for starting an indirect motion is refreshingly small.

First, define an ideal partner profile.

The logic is the same as defining an ICP for your customers. Not every organization capable of signing a partnership agreement is capable of producing revenue for you.

Ask:

Where do they already sell?
Which industries, geographies and customer segments do they know?

Who do they already know?
Do they have an existing book of business that overlaps your ICP?

What capabilities do they bring?
Do they have sellers, technical resources, implementation expertise or service capacity?

Why would they invest in this partnership?
What is valuable to them beyond adding another vendor logo?

Can both sides trust each other with the customer relationship?

Then start with a small group.

Braswell recommends finding the first five or ten partners that appear capable of producing results rather than racing to recruit hundreds.

That gives the company room to discover what actually makes a partner productive: what training they need, which incentives work, where deals get stuck and what type of customer is most receptive to the indirect motion.

A small productive ecosystem is more useful than a large inactive directory.

The strongest GTM model may be hybrid

The most useful conclusion from the direct-vs.-indirect debate may be that you shouldn't settle it at the company level.

Settle it at the market-segment level.

Direct may make sense for strategic enterprise accounts where buyers want a close vendor relationship.

Partners may be stronger in the mid-market, a particular industry or a geography where trusted local relationships matter.

A systems integrator might be the best route when your product creates more value as part of a larger implementation.

A referral partner may introduce opportunities but leave your internal sales team to run the deal.

A reseller may own far more of the sales process.

Modern channel strategy is increasingly moving in this direction. Partners are not necessarily substitutes for direct sellers. They can source, influence, implement, integrate, advise and co-sell around the same customer.

That changes the question from:

Should we sell direct or through partners?

to:

Where does each route to market have an advantage?

Hybrid sales fails when nobody knows who owns the deal

Running both motions creates another problem: channel conflict.

Imagine an account already being worked by a direct rep. A partner then registers the same opportunity and expects commission.

Who owns it?

Who sourced it?

Who gets quota credit?

What happens if both contributed?

If those questions are being debated only after a six-figure opportunity appears, the operating model is already too late.

Braswell has seen the compensation tension repeatedly. Paying both the direct rep and partner full credit sounds like the easiest cultural solution, but it can become expensive quickly.

The alternative is splitting economics or credit.

That only works when the rules of engagement are explicit.

A hybrid model therefore needs decisions around:

• deal registration

• sourcing attribution

• partner-influenced versus partner-sourced revenue

• account ownership

• commission splits

• quota credit

• co-selling responsibilities

• escalation when rules are disputed

Leadership also has to make the cultural position clear.

If a direct sales team believes partners exist to take away its commissions, collaboration will fail regardless of how attractive the partner strategy looks in a spreadsheet.

The organization has to understand when a partner expands an opportunity rather than competes for it.

SaaS channels are moving beyond traditional resale

Indirect sales in technology is changing too.

Traditional reselling isn't the only way partners create economic value. As SaaS, cloud marketplaces and consumption-based models change how software is purchased, services can become increasingly important to the partner proposition.

A partner may make money helping a customer:

configure a product, integrate it into an existing stack, optimize its implementation, manage it over time or combine it with another solution.

That means the value of the partner can exist before, during and after the software transaction.

For vendors, this opens up a broader view of the ecosystem.

The best partner may not simply be the organization capable of reselling your license.

It may be the organization that makes your product substantially more useful to the customer.

Could AI become part of the indirect sales model?

AI will undoubtedly change some of the work around partnerships.

Agents can already assist with prospect research, lead qualification, account mapping, partner enablement and other parts of the revenue process.

But Braswell is skeptical that AI replaces the core reason many channel relationships work in the first place.

Trust between a customer and an advisor is accumulated over repeated interactions, often across different products, projects and business problems.

An AI agent may make that advisor more productive. It may help identify opportunities, configure solutions or find information faster.

That is different from replacing the relationship itself.

The more interesting future may therefore be AI-enabled partners, not AI replacing partners.

So, when can indirect sales outperform direct?

Indirect sales have the strongest case when a partner brings something that would be expensive or slow for the vendor to recreate internally.

That could be distribution.

It could be geographic reach.

It could be technical services.

But frequently, it is access to customers who already trust that partner.

Direct sales remains stronger when speed, control, learning or a direct strategic customer relationship is more important.

And that is why the most mature answer isn't choosing a winner.

A strong revenue organization can know exactly where direct sales should lead, where partners should lead, and where the two should work the same opportunity together.

The point of a partner ecosystem isn't to replace your sales team.

It's to extend where—and how—you can sell.