Most businesses trading between India and Latin America are, in practice, represented by someone the head office has met three times. That person is usually described as a channel decision. They are nothing of the sort — as far as that market is concerned, they are the company.
There is a striking mismatch here. The distributor decision determines more about how a business performs in a distant market than almost any other choice, and it routinely receives less scrutiny than a mid-sized software purchase. Partners get appointed because they were enthusiastic at a trade fair, because they asked first, or because the margin split looked acceptable. Then the business spends three years learning what it actually bought.
What the partner actually controls
It is worth being blunt about how much of the business passes into someone else's hands the day the agreement is signed.
They set your price positioning. A discount-driven trader and a technically-led specialist will sell the identical product to entirely different customers at entirely different prices, and the market will form its view of your brand accordingly — a view that is expensive to change later.
They decide which customers ever hear of you. Your reach in that market is precisely their address book, and no more. If their relationships sit in a segment you did not target, that is now your segment.
They deliver the service experience that determines whether anyone buys twice. In technical categories, a partner without service capacity does not produce slow growth; it produces one round of sales followed by silence.
And in many cases they hold your regulatory standing — which deserves its own discussion.
The registration trap
In a number of markets, product registrations, certifications and import licences can be held in the local partner's name. Early on this feels like a favour: they know the authority, they have done it before, and it removes an obstacle from a process that already has too many. Many exporters accept it without much thought.
The consequence surfaces years later. If the registration sits with the partner, you cannot change partner without losing your legal right to sell — which means you cannot credibly threaten to leave. Every subsequent negotiation over price, targets, exclusivity or service happens with both sides knowing that. A commercial relationship that cannot be ended is not a partnership; it is a dependency with a contract attached.
The remedy is unglamorous and must be applied at the start: hold registrations in your own name where the regulation permits it, and where it does not, make transferability an explicit written obligation with a defined process — before the first shipment, while you still have something to trade.
Choose on fit, not on enthusiasm
The most eager candidate is often the one with the least to lose, and enthusiasm is the easiest quality to fake in a first meeting. More telling questions get asked less often.
What else do they carry, and does your line compete for attention against something larger in their own portfolio? A small line in a big distributor is frequently worse served than a significant line in a modest one. Do they already sell to the customers you actually want, or to a different segment they are confident they can reach? Do they employ people who can support the product technically, or only people who can sell it? And what does their working capital look like — a partner who cannot fund stock will quietly convert your availability strategy into a ship-on-order model, whatever the agreement says.
Staying present from far away
Choosing well is not sufficient, because the relationship decays without contact. Distance turns a good partner into an uninformed one — not through bad faith, but because nobody is asking. The practical countermeasures are ordinary: a fixed contact rhythm rather than contact when something goes wrong, shared visibility of the pipeline rather than a sales figure at quarter end, joint customer visits at least once a year, and real investment in training their people on the product.
None of that is sophisticated. It is simply the difference between a partner who represents you and one who occasionally resells you. Businesses that succeed at fifteen thousand kilometres seldom have better logistics than the ones that fail. They have partners chosen on fit rather than eagerness, structured so that the relationship can be corrected — and then actually maintained.