A reseller is a salesperson who has chosen not to work for you.
They carry several products, they are paid on what closes, and they will spend Tuesday on whichever one closes fastest. That is not disloyalty, it is the rational behaviour of somebody running their own business, and it is the single fact that decides whether your channel strategy works.
Which it will not, if what you hand them is a product nobody has yet proved anybody wants.
From a market of 1.3 million people the channel looks like the obvious answer. Partners give you reach you cannot hire, in countries you cannot staff, without a local entity. The appeal is real. The problem is that you are proposing to outsource the hardest unsolved problem in the business, which is working out why anybody in that market buys, to the person with the least reason to solve it.
So the sequence matters more than the strategy. You have to win the first several customers in a new market directly, slowly and painfully, because that is the only way to learn what you are handing over. A partner can scale a repeatable sale. They cannot discover one.
What you are actually asking them to do
Put yourself on their side of the table for a moment, because this is the part founders skip.
A partner has an existing book of customers and a finite number of conversations a month. Adding your product means spending some of those conversations on something unfamiliar, from a supplier their client has never heard of, in a category where they will have to explain the problem before they can sell the solution.
For that they want the same thing you want: the highest chance of closing per hour spent.
So the question they are silently asking is not whether your product is good. It is whether they can sell it next month. If the answer involves them doing education, discovery and category creation, they will take your margin, put you in the catalogue, and never mention you again. You will have a signed partner agreement and no revenue, which is the most common outcome of channel expansion and the hardest to notice, because the agreement looks like progress.
A partner multiplies a sale that already works. There is nothing to multiply if it does not.
The question that predicts the whole thing
One question separates a partner who will produce revenue from one who will not, and it is not about their customer list.
Has this partner sold something in your category before, or do they simply have relationships with the right companies?
Relationships are the thing founders get excited about, and they are the less valuable half. A reseller with excellent relationships and no category experience has to learn your market before they can sell you, which means the education cost lands on them, and they will not pay it.
A partner who has sold adjacent products into the same buyers already knows the objections, the procurement path, the budget line it comes out of and the person who signs. They can place you in a conversation they were having anyway.
Ask directly, and ask for specifics. Which products, over what period, to which buyers, and what happened to those accounts. Vague answers here are the whole answer.
The measurement that flatters every channel programme
Here is the thing I would most want you to take from this, because it is how companies spend three years on a channel that never worked.
There are two kinds of channel revenue and almost nobody separates them.
Partner-sourced means the partner found the customer. You would not have had that deal.
Partner-assisted means you found the customer and a partner was involved somewhere in the transaction, perhaps because the buyer prefers to purchase through an existing supplier, or because somebody needed a local invoice.
Partner-assisted revenue is genuinely useful. It is also not evidence that your channel generates demand, and it is routinely reported as though it were. A programme showing healthy partner numbers that are nearly all assisted is a programme where you are still doing the selling and paying a margin for the privilege.
Split the two from the first deal. If partner-sourced is zero after a year, the channel has not started, whatever the dashboard says.
What exclusivity costs, and one legal detail
Partners will ask for exclusivity, usually early, and usually for a territory larger than they can cover.
The honest trade: exclusivity is the thing you give in exchange for investment. If they are hiring someone, building a demo environment, training staff, then a protected territory for a defined period is reasonable. If they are adding you to a list, you are paying a market for nothing and you will not get it back without a fight.
Where you do grant it, put a performance condition and an end date on it, and define the territory smaller than they ask.
One EU-specific detail worth knowing before you draft anything. Distribution agreements inside the EU sit under the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation, Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/720, in force since June 2022 and running to May 2034. Its safe harbour applies where both you and the buyer hold under 30% market share, which for an Estonian company entering a new country is almost certainly true.
The part that catches people: setting a minimum or fixed resale price is a hardcore restriction, and the published commentary is consistent that a hardcore restriction can cost you the exemption for the whole agreement rather than just that clause. Restricting territories and customers, and preventing a buyer from using the internet effectively, are treated similarly.
Which means the instinct to protect your pricing by telling the reseller what to charge is the specific thing you cannot do. I could not reach the Official Journal text directly to check the exact article wording, and this is one section of a marketing post rather than legal advice, so have a competition lawyer read your agreement before you sign it. The practical point stands either way: design the deal around margin and support rather than around controlling their price.
When the channel genuinely is the answer
In fairness, there are cases where going direct is not available, and in those the sequence I described does not apply.
Where the buyer requires a local legal entity to contract with, which happens in parts of the public sector. Where the product needs physical installation or service. Where a regulated market demands a locally licensed supplier. Where your product is a component of something larger that somebody else assembles.
In those situations the partner is not a shortcut, it is the only route, and the work is choosing well and supporting properly rather than deciding whether to do it. I touched on the related version of this for EU public tenders, where bidding jointly with a local firm is often the fastest honest way into a country.
Where I come out
If you have not sold to anybody in that country yet, do not sign a partner. Go and win three customers the hard way, badly, with the founder on the calls.
You will learn what the objection is, what the buying process looks like and what the thing is actually worth there. Then you will have something a partner can sell next month, which is the only product they are interested in.
And the first conversation with a prospective partner should be you asking what they have sold in your category, not you explaining what your product does.
If you’d like to think through whether your sale is repeatable enough to hand over yet, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on how I work cover the rest. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.