When your best customers are also your competitors

The plan was right and it couldn't be run

I'd done the work. The product with the most search volume, the most obvious demand, the clearest path to being found. It was the thing the business was best known for and the thing it had most of. Every signal said lead with it.

Then the owner explained, perfectly calmly, that he couldn't. The businesses buying that product from him were reselling it. If he started advertising it directly to the end customer, he'd be competing with his own customers, and they'd notice within a week.

That's a constraint I'd never had to think about, and once I understood it I started seeing it everywhere. It's completely invisible from the outside, it doesn't show up in any keyword tool, and it will quietly ruin a marketing plan that's correct in every other respect.

What channel conflict actually is

If you sell to businesses who then sell the same thing on, you have two customers with opposing interests. The reseller wants demand to come to them. You want demand full stop. Every ad you run to the end customer is a small argument that they should skip the middle.

The reseller's leverage is that they can stop buying from you. Yours is that you have the product. That balance holds fine until somebody's advertising makes it visible, and it's usually the supplier who breaks it first, because the supplier is the one being told by everybody, including people like me, that they should be doing more marketing.

The three bad answers

Most businesses in this position land on one of three, and all of them cost something.

The first is to advertise anyway and hope nobody notices. They notice. Resellers watch their own market closely, and a supplier appearing in the feed above them is exactly the kind of thing that gets screenshotted into a group chat.

The second is to stop marketing altogether. This is the most common and it's the most expensive, because the constraint applies to one product line and the business treats it as applying to everything. I've seen businesses with several perfectly conflict-free product lines sitting on no marketing at all, because the flagship product couldn't be advertised and nobody separated the two.

The third is to go direct properly, cut the resellers, and accept the fight. That's a legitimate strategy and occasionally the right one, but it's a change to the business model rather than a marketing decision, and it should be made by the owner with a spreadsheet, not by a marketer with a keyword tool.

The answer is usually sitting next to the problem

Almost every business with a channel conflict on one line has other lines with no conflict at all, and they're usually being ignored precisely because they're less glamorous.

The consumables are the obvious one. The thing that gets used up and reordered, that nobody bothers to resell because the margin per unit is small and the volume is annoying. That's often the best thing you own, because it brings the same customer back on a schedule and no reseller is fighting you for it.

Then the specialist lines. The version for one industry with one specific requirement, where the resellers don't have the knowledge and don't want the inventory. Low volume, high margin, and nobody is competing with you because nobody else wants the complexity.

And the things only you can service. Parts, repairs, the equipment nobody else stocks. If a reseller can't fulfil it, advertising it isn't competition, it's demand generation for a thing that has to come through you either way.

None of those is the flagship, and that's the point. The marketing lives on the lines nobody's fighting over while the flagship keeps doing what it already does, which is arriving through the channel without help.

You can still do everything else

Worth being clear about how narrow this constraint actually is, because businesses treat it as much wider than it is.

It applies to direct demand generation for a contested line. It does not apply to your brand, your website, your search presence for your own name, your reviews, or anything that makes you look like a serious operation to the businesses buying from you. All of that helps the reseller relationship rather than threatening it, because a supplier who looks credible makes the reseller look credible.

It doesn't apply to content either. Explaining how the product works, what the standards are, how to specify it, is useful to the end customer and useful to the reseller's own sales conversation. That is the same argument as publishing the method rather than gating it. The Foundational Marketing Blueprint→ A supplier whose material gets used by their resellers to close their own deals is in a very strong position, and that's the opposite of conflict.

And it doesn't apply to the system underneath. Every enquiry landing somewhere, follow-up that runs, reviews being asked for, none of that is visible to a reseller as competition, and it's usually where the actual gains are anyway. Five automations every business needs→ covers the follow-up half and How to get more Google reviews→ the other.

Ask before you plan, not after

The thing I got wrong was the order. I built a plan and presented it, and the constraint surfaced in the meeting rather than before it. It's one question, and it belongs at the start of the first conversation with any business that sells to other businesses.

1. Who else sells what you sell?

   Not competitors. Customers. The answer sorts the product list into contested and clear faster than any amount of research, and most owners have never been asked it directly.

2. Which lines would upset somebody if they saw an ad for them?

   Owners know this immediately and precisely. It's rarely the whole catalogue and it's often only one or two lines, which is why the honest answer usually opens up more room than anybody expected.

3. What can nobody else fulfil?

   Parts, service, specialist stock, anything requiring knowledge the channel doesn't have. This is the list the marketing should be built on, and it's almost never where the business assumed the attention should go.