In today's competitive B2B market, how you go to market is just as important as what you sell. One of the most consequential decisions B2B leaders face is whether to scale through a direct sales force, invest in indirect channel partners, or build a hybrid GTM motion.
With buyers demanding more value-aligned experiences and cost pressures rising, the efficiency and scalability of your sales model have become strategic imperatives, not just operational concerns.
Understanding Direct Sales
What Is Direct Sales?
Direct sales refers to a model where companies engage directly with the end customer. The organization handles the full customer lifecycle, from lead generation to closing the deal, using its own sales resources. This gives companies full ownership of branding, pricing, customer messaging, and service delivery.
Advantages of Direct Sales
Control over customer experience: Companies manage the entire sales process and customer journey without intermediaries, ensuring consistent brand messaging and service quality.
Higher profit margins: No need to share revenue with partners, which can lead to higher margins when executed efficiently and at appropriate scale.
Direct customer feedback: Sales teams gain unfiltered insights from prospects and customers, fueling faster product iteration and more responsive development cycles.
Strategic account management: Direct relationships enable deeper understanding of customer needs, facilitating upsells, cross-sells, and long-term account development.
Challenges of Direct Sales
High scaling costs: Building and managing a full sales team requires significant financial and human capital investment, including salaries, benefits, training, and ongoing enablement.
Slower market entry: Penetrating new regions or industries without established local connections can be slow, requiring time to build relationships and market knowledge.
Limited reach: Organizations are constrained by the reach and capacity of their internal teams, making rapid geographic or vertical expansion difficult.
Fixed cost structure: Sales team costs remain relatively fixed regardless of revenue fluctuations, creating financial risk during market downturns or slow periods.
Exploring Indirect Sales Channels
What Is Indirect Sales?
In an indirect sales model, third-party partners such as resellers, systems integrators, managed service providers, or referral agents (commonly called "channel partners") are responsible for selling a company's offerings. These partners leverage their own relationships, networks, and infrastructure to extend the vendor's reach.
Advantages of Indirect Sales
Faster market expansion: Partners often bring established relationships in local or niche markets, enabling rapid geographic or vertical penetration without building local teams.
Lower fixed costs: Instead of hiring a full internal team, the company shares revenue with external partners, converting fixed costs to variable costs tied to performance.
Scalability: The model is easier to replicate across geographies and verticals with the right partners in place, enabling growth without proportional headcount increases.
Local market expertise: Partners understand regional nuances, regulatory requirements, and cultural preferences that would take years for internal teams to develop.
Challenges of Indirect Sales
Reduced control: Sales processes, customer messaging, and brand representation are handled externally, requiring strong governance and enablement to maintain consistency.
Revenue sharing: Partners take a portion of the profits (typically 20-40% margins for resellers), which can reduce margin if not managed strategically.
Partner management overhead: Requires dedicated resources to recruit, onboard, enable, train, and incentivize the right partners for sustained performance.
Attribution complexity: Tracking which partners truly drive revenue versus which simply register deals becomes challenging, requiring robust reporting infrastructure.
Related: Understanding Channel Partners: A Comprehensive Guide
Why Indirect Sales Is on the Rise
The shift toward ecosystem-led growth is not just theoretical. It's backed by clear performance data demonstrating superior economics and efficiency.
Performance Data Supporting Indirect Sales
The EBSTA 2024 GTM Benchmark Report found that:
Partner-sourced revenue has 35% higher win rate
25% lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) compared to direct sales motions
Broader market context (2024 B2B sales benchmarks):
Win rates decreased 18% year-over-year
Deal values dropped 21%
Sales cycles increased 16%
These metrics validate what forward-looking B2B leaders already know: partnerships are not just support functions. They are strategic revenue channels that outperform direct sales on key efficiency metrics.
Market Dynamics Driving Indirect Growth
Buyer behavior shifts: Modern B2B buyers conduct extensive independent research before engaging sales, relying heavily on peer recommendations, integration ecosystems, and trusted advisor input. Partners provide the trust layer that accelerates buying decisions.
Solution bundling expectations: Customers increasingly expect integrated solutions rather than point products. Partners enable solution bundling by combining complementary offerings, creating more compelling value propositions.
Economic efficiency pressures: As sales and marketing costs rise, companies seek more efficient go-to-market approaches. Indirect channels convert fixed costs to variable costs while often delivering better unit economics.
Ecosystem maturity: As partner ecosystems mature, network effects strengthen. Established partner programs benefit from gravitational pull, making partner recruitment easier and ecosystem growth self-reinforcing.
Comparative Analysis: Direct vs. Indirect Sales
Category | Direct Sales | Indirect Sales |
Control | High, with full ownership of sales process | Moderate, requires strong partner oversight |
Market Reach | Limited to internal capacity | Broader, via partner networks |
Customer Access | Direct insight into needs and behavior | Dependent on partner feedback |
Cost to Scale | High fixed costs | Lower, mostly variable based on partner success |
Speed to Market | Slower, internal expansion required | Faster through established partner networks |
Brand Consistency | Fully managed in-house | Requires enablement and partner training |
Margin Structure | Higher per-deal margins | Lower margins due to revenue sharing |
Customer Relationship | Direct, long-term account ownership | Indirect, mediated through partner |
Use Cases: When Each Model Works Best
Choose Direct Sales When:
Complex, high-touch offerings: Your product requires consultative selling with deep technical expertise and extended sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders.
Market definition phase: The market is still being defined, and you need tight feedback loops to iterate fast on product-market fit.
Enterprise compliance requirements: You serve enterprise customers with specific compliance, security, or regulatory requirements that demand direct vendor relationships.
Full visibility needs: You require complete visibility into customer data, sales performance, and buying patterns for strategic decision-making.
High-value strategic accounts: Your average contract value justifies the high cost of direct sales engagement, typically $100K+ annual contract value.
Choose Indirect Sales When:
Geographic expansion goals: You want to expand into new markets or verticals without building local teams and infrastructure.
Product maturity: Your product is mature, easy to sell, relatively standardized, and already proven in the market with clear value propositions.
Solution bundling opportunities: You benefit from bundling your solution with a partner's offering to create more comprehensive customer value.
Cost efficiency priority: Speed and cost-efficiency are more important than owning every aspect of the customer experience.
SMB and mid-market focus: Your target customers are small to mid-sized businesses where lower deal sizes require more efficient sales approaches.
Real-World Examples: Direct and Indirect in Practice
Direct Sales Example: Salesforce
Salesforce uses a highly coordinated direct sales model for enterprise and strategic accounts. Its teams are structured around industries and account size, with full ownership of customer relationships. This gives Salesforce strong control over the buyer journey, contract terms, and renewals.
That said, Salesforce also uses ISVs and consulting partners to expand reach and implementation success, showing how direct models can coexist with indirect support.
Indirect Sales Example: Cisco
Cisco's revenue model is built on a powerful indirect channel. The company enables partners with training, marketing, and co-selling tools while incentivizing them through tiered rewards. This has allowed Cisco to scale into new markets and maintain global coverage without proportional internal hiring.
Cisco's partner program demonstrates the power of well-structured indirect sales: comprehensive partner enablement, clear tier structures, performance-based incentives, and strong partner marketing support.
Related: What Is a B2B Partner Program?
Why the Future Is Hybrid
Leading companies are combining the best of both models into hybrid go-to-market strategies. This allows them to maintain ownership of key accounts while scaling reach and efficiency through partners.
Hybrid Model Structure
Direct sales teams focus on enterprise or high-potential strategic accounts requiring deep engagement and custom solutions.
Indirect partners cover mid-market, SMB, or regional territories where partner economics and local presence provide advantages.
Referral partners and influencers expand top-of-funnel reach by recommending solutions within their networks and client bases.
Strategic alliances create new joint offerings and integrated solutions that neither party could deliver independently.
Why Hybrid Models Win
This approach aligns with how modern buyers purchase: through a mix of direct education, third-party validation, and trusted advisor input. Hybrid models provide flexibility to match sales motion to customer segment, deal size, and strategic importance.
Flexibility: Adapt go-to-market approach based on account value, complexity, and strategic fit.
Efficiency: Optimize cost structure by deploying direct resources only where they provide clear ROI advantage.
Resilience: Diversified revenue streams protect against market shifts, economic downturns, or changes in buyer behavior.
Coverage: Combine the depth of direct relationships with the breadth of partner networks for comprehensive market coverage.
Building Partner Ecosystem Visibility
Regardless of whether you choose direct, indirect, or hybrid sales models, companies with indirect or hybrid approaches need infrastructure to make their partner ecosystems visible and measurable.
Discovery and Showcase Infrastructure
Partner program discovery: Companies building indirect sales channels need visibility for their partner programs. Platforms like Partner2B make partner programs discoverable when potential partners actively search for partnership opportunities, driving inbound partner recruitment.
Partner marketplace infrastructure: Companies with mature indirect sales channels (50+ partners) benefit from owned marketplace infrastructure. Solutions like Bonobee provide searchable partner directories on company domains, showcasing ecosystem depth to customers while providing partners with visibility that drives their performance.
Visibility metrics: Track partner program page views, partner marketplace traffic, partner-generated referral traffic, and customer engagement with partner content to measure ecosystem visibility effectiveness.
Strategic Value of Visibility
Visible partner ecosystems strengthen indirect sales in multiple ways:
Partner recruitment: Prospective partners can easily discover and evaluate your program
Customer confidence: Buyers see ecosystem depth before engaging sales, reducing perceived risk
Competitive differentiation: Visible ecosystems demonstrate market maturity and platform stability
Partner performance: Partners gain visibility that drives their success, improving retention and engagement
Strategic Takeaway: Your Sales Model Is a Strategic Asset
Your sales model is not just a way to close deals. It is a reflection of how you meet customer needs, allocate resources, and align with the market. Choosing the right model should be an intentional decision grounded in data, not legacy structure.
Direct sales offers control, deep engagement, and clarity but requires significant investment and scales slowly.
Indirect sales provides scale, reach, and cost efficiency but demands partner management discipline and visibility infrastructure.
Hybrid models deliver resilience and flexibility when orchestrated strategically, combining the benefits of both approaches.
Key Decision Factors
When evaluating your sales model, consider:
Average contract value: Does deal size justify direct sales costs?
Product complexity: Does selling require deep technical expertise or can partners be effectively enabled?
Market maturity: Are you defining a new market or scaling in established markets?
Geographic strategy: Are you expanding globally or focusing on specific regions?
Customer expectations: Do target customers expect direct vendor relationships or partner-mediated experiences?
Competitive positioning: How do competitors go to market, and where can you differentiate?
Whichever model you choose, remember that partnerships are not shortcuts. They are multipliers. With the right infrastructure for partner visibility, enablement, and performance tracking, you can turn your ecosystem into a revenue engine that scales efficiently while maintaining quality customer experiences.
Continue Learning About Sales Models and Partnerships
Building an indirect or hybrid sales model? Partner2B helps companies make their partner programs discoverable, while Bonobee provides marketplace infrastructure for companies with mature partner ecosystems.
