Just a few more points about channel and how your product works with the channel or how your solution works with the channel. We've been talking about product market fit. This is sort of product channel fit and th, there are some additional issues that, that need attention. Basically you can think about products as having more and more value added. And more and more, let's call it distribution complexity. And the amount of that affects where you're going to have to distribute it and what kind of channel you're going to have to use. This diagram shows increasing marketing complexity on the y-axis and increasing solution complexity on the x-axis. So at the top right there, you see a product that's extremely hard to market and extremely complex to implement. That really requires some kind of third party like a systems integrator. A systems integrator can run interference for all of the complexity of your product, both the complexity of selling it to customers, which requires a whole solution sale, a, a, a long drawn-out educational and evangelistic sale. And they could also handle the complexity delivering the solution, which typically involves lots of professional services may involve training may involve follow on actual operation of the solution so on and so forth. The, the systems integrator is your glue with a very complex product or, or, or service. As you sort of move down there you get things like WANs or mainframes. These are sort of old-fashioned examples, but those require a direct sales force because they're hard to sell. And there's a bit of complexity involved in the solution. You need somebody standing there, holding the customers hand, talking them through the problem telling them why they should buy it, selling them on it in person in a customized way there's no way around it. The problem is that employing a direct sales force costs a lot of margin, costs a lot of money. If you have it yourself, or even if you outsource it that's, that's a big investment. You need a product that's high enough margin and that's high enough revenue per sales event, that it's worth having the direct sales force to, to do it. So if you run across a product that you can only sell for very little money, but which is going to need a direct sales force to sell, that's kind of a disconnect. That's kind of a no no. That, that, that's something you should think about. Moving down this sort of ramp here getting to things like LANs minicomputers, maybe even PCs and servers, these are low touch items that require quite a bit less in terms of hand-holding. Every kind of knows what a PC is by now. Everyone kind of knows what a local area network is. They, they, they kind of know how to set them up and what's involved. You still need some touch and you still need some value add in terms of delivering the solution but it's much less and the, and the volume is higher. In that case you're looking at something like a VAR, a value added reseller. This is somebody who works for you, you're one of many things that they sell. They go in, they sort of assess what solution the customer needs and they have a, a number of almost cookie cutter things in their book that they can use to solve that problem. And they pick yours because you've spiffed them or because they've heard from customers it's the best solution or because the customer asks for it. That's just sort of VAR relationship. Moving on down even lower touch and higher volume is retail. A retailer can certainly take the temperature of the customer, direct them towards a solution do a little bit of of support or at least accept returns but a retailer is not a profoundly knowledgeable. There are exceptions. There are very knowledgable retailers. But they're, they're not adding the same amount of value that a VAR is, or a direct sales force, or a systems integrator. They're lower down on the, on the same hierarchy. And then finally down on the very low end where it's quite high volume and very low touch, you have something like a web telesales kind of channel where you have people it's called dialing for dollars. They're calling out, they're they have some script that they read to people and they have some set of questions that they ask in order to qualify the people and then they pass on the qualified leads either to website or to a, a very small direct sales force. Or, or someone else to follow up. Its a very broad volume. It, it's good for products that have relatively little need for touch and is well suited to products that are virtual and web based and and very low in terms of solution complexity if you will. So looking up and down this thing you have to weigh how complicated your product is to buy, how complicated it is to deploy, how complicated it is to support. And match the channel to that complexity, and understand that if you need a complex channel to sell your product, you probably need a pretty high price mark in order to sell the, in order to sell that product profitably, because the further up you get on this ramp, the more expensive these channels are. Which type of channels are best? Well, I, I think from this discussion and the last discussion, you can see that that's probably not an easy question to answer. It depends. Well, A it depends and B it's not up to you. Customer segments generally want specific channels. They're used to buying products in certain ways. And it depends on on what you need to add in the way of value to the product in order to deliver it to the customer. Once you sort of get done with those two factors, there's not that much choice about channels but you do have to figure that out. It also may be different for different kinds of channels. So your sales channel may be one way, your distribution channel may be another way and your support channel may be yet a third way. What you've got to find is what we're calling product channel fit and as we're saying it, it it falls out of what customers want now and what the needs of your solution are. So the main points are the channel is related to product and distribution complexity. The customers have channel habits that you kind of have to respect. Certain value propositions want or need specific channels, depending on the level of touch and the level of of difficulty implementing the, the product. And there has to be some kind of channel product fit. Thank you.
