When I tell people I work in distribution, I get one of two faces. Polite confusion, or the look you get when you say you work in insurance.
Fair enough. Nobody grows up wanting to work in distribution. But most of the technology around you got to you through it, and I think it’s one of the most interesting corners of tech right now.
The chain, in plain English
Take the barcode scanner at a supermarket till.
The vendor designs and makes it. The distributor buys it in volume, holds the stock, offers credit, handles the logistics and supports lots of resellers. The reseller (or integrator, or managed service provider) works with the supermarket, designs the setup, installs it and looks after it. The end customer just wants the queues to move.
Each link earns its place by doing something the others can’t do as well. A maker can’t run credit lines for thousands of small resellers. A reseller can’t stock every model. A distributor can’t be on site at 6am when a store goes live.
Why it isn’t a side route
Jay McBain, who has spent years analysing this world, put numbers on it in an interview on Crossbeam’s blog. About two thirds of all IT spending is delivered through partners, and 96% is influenced by them. 89% of sellers use partners every day.
So when a founder tells me “we’ll sell direct first and think about the channel later”, I get it. But for a lot of hardware and business software, the channel is the market.
What my days look like
I sit in the middle. Makers want their products sold and understood. Resellers want stock, prices, answers and someone who’ll fight their corner. Some days I’m a translator, some days a detective chasing a delivery, some days a coach helping a reseller explain a product to their own customer.
The variety is the best bit. In one week I can go from a two-device order for a corner shop to a rollout across a whole retail chain.
And AI?
AI is about to make this world faster. Price lists, quotes, stock checks and order updates are exactly the repetitive lookups machines do well. Good.
What it won’t replace is the trust between the links. A reseller rings the person who helped them last time.
If you’re building a product, learn the chain early. It decides how far you go.
