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A Field Guide to Channel Strategy: Building Routes to Market
by Anne T. Coughlan and Sandy D. Jap
Published: 2016
Recommended by Tom Harker
Categories: partnerships
Why should you read it?
Anne Coughlan and Sandy Jap published this book in 2016, and it sits downstream of channel research going back to the 1970s. Its frameworks cover problems that the partnerships community keeps relitigating from first principles. The field is not standing on the shoulders of its own discipline. It is standing next to it, insisting it can't reach.
What is the book about?
Building a route to market is fundamental to sales and survival, and this book demystifies marketing channel strategy by focusing on channel design and management. It offers practical tools and frameworks for key decisions and highlights the critical tradeoffs and pitfalls. Among them: a governance model for preventing partner opportunism, a typology of channel conflict, a framework for diagnosing power asymmetry when a partner is far bigger than you, a relational investment model that sorts partners by economic potential and relationship state, and a partnering framework built on complementary competencies, mutual investment and trust. The authors compare many channel strategies to the wood towers of stacking games: as partners, routes to market and product lines change, the strategy must adapt to keep the tower from collapsing.
Best takeaway
Partnerships as a recognized, funded, board-visible function is genuinely newer. The practice is not new. The profession just keeps acting like it is.
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