Seven Questions to Ask Before You Appoint a Distributor
The damage from a bad distributor is slow. You do not find out for two years, by which point you have lost the market and the relationship is contractually difficult to exit.
We have seen more regional strategies destroyed by the wrong partner than by the wrong product, the wrong price and the wrong timing combined. It is rarely a dramatic failure. Orders simply do not appear, explanations are always plausible, and by the time the pattern is undeniable several years have gone.
The questions below are the ones that surface the problem before you sign rather than after. None of them is difficult to ask. What matters is how a candidate responds, and particularly where they become uncomfortable.
1. What else do you represent, and what is your margin on each?
Do not ask whether they carry competing lines. They will say no, and they may even be right in the narrow sense. Ask for the full portfolio and the commercial structure behind it.
What you are really establishing is where you would sit in their priority list. A partner with an impressive roster of international brands is not necessarily a strong partner for you. Those brands compete for the same salespeople, the same customer visits and the same quarter. If your product carries a thinner margin or a longer sales cycle than what sits beside it, you will lose that internal competition every week, invisibly.
The impressive portfolio is often the warning rather than the credential. Ask yourself honestly where you would rank in it, and whether you can live with the answer.
2. Show me your last three tender losses in my category
A strong partner answers this directly and has already analysed why each was lost. A weaker one either does not track it or would rather you did not see it. Both are disqualifying, and this is the question where the difference shows fastest.
The quality of the post-mortem tells you more than the win rate. Someone who says the price was too high has learned nothing. Someone who can tell you which specification clause excluded them, and when it was written, is operating at the level you need.
3. Who will actually carry my product, and what else are they carrying?
Dedicated resource is one of the most elastic phrases in partner negotiations. In practice it frequently means one salesperson with a long list of product lines, of which yours will be neither the easiest nor the most lucrative.
Ask for the name. Ask what else that person is responsible for. Then ask to meet them, separately from the management who are selling you the partnership. The gap between the two conversations is informative.
4. What is your local content position, and can you evidence it?
In-country value requirements have moved from compliance annexe to scoring mechanism across much of the region. A partner who cannot evidence their position with certificates, local manufacturing content or workforce nationalisation ratios is not going to score points for you, whatever they say about their relationships.
This is also a useful proxy for how seriously they take the direction of travel in their own market. A partner who has invested in their local content position has been reading the policy environment. One who has not may be running on relationships formed a decade ago.
5. What does your access to the end user look like?
Not the contractor. The asset owner, the operator, the organisation that writes the specification.
Many capable regional distributors are excellent at contractor relationships and effectively invisible to the people who decide what gets specified in the first place. That distinction decides tenders. If your partner only appears once a project is out to bid, they are competing for a specification somebody else shaped.
6. What happens to the pipeline data?
If you cannot see their project list, their quotation log and their loss reasons, you are managing a business you cannot observe. You will be told that things are progressing, and you will have no way to test it until a year has passed.
Make data access a contractual term rather than a courtesy. Agree the format and the cadence before signing, because the request becomes far harder once the relationship is underway and the answer has become inconvenient.
7. What are the exit terms, and how long does it really take?
Ask this while everyone is still enthusiastic. You will not get a useful answer once you are unhappy.
In several jurisdictions across the region, commercial agency protections make exit considerably slower and more expensive than the contract text suggests. Registration status matters. So does whether the arrangement is exclusive, and on what territory and product definitions. These are questions for counsel in the relevant jurisdiction, not for the partner's own lawyer, and they are worth the fee before signature rather than after.
How to read the answers
If a candidate handles all seven comfortably, you have probably found a partner. If they become uncomfortable at question two, you have found out early, which is the entire point of asking.
The most expensive partner decisions we have seen were not made carelessly. They were made by capable people who chose the candidate who made them feel most comfortable in the room, rather than the one whose incentives were aligned with theirs. Those are different things, and the difference usually takes two years to become visible.
Is this what you are working on?
Describe it and you will have a considered written response within one business day. No sales script, and an honest answer on whether we are the right firm for it.