A recession is a good time to sit back and analyze your go to market strategy and, part of this, to think about going international, online or through a reseller network. You may be already selling internationally in same language markets/through a few reseller partners – now is a good time to expand.

So why is it good to go international NOW?

• Spread risk (don’t put all eggs in one basket).
• Increase market base (there’s a variety of markets out there, from small to large software markets in both established and emerging economies. Not to mention that an increasing online population makes it easier than ever before to sell software online).
• Increase revenue.

Let’s dwell on this last point for a bit. When it comes to building a partner network, you need to start right about now to be fully up to speed when the recession is over and things start booming again. It doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t get anything out of your channel during the recession (that’s not a promise either), but in general you have to be ready to support it for at least 6 months without seeing much return.

No more than 20 questions :) and you will receive a full copy of the survey report.

I won’t lie to you: at the beginning of the month we had no intention of doing a survey on channel distribution in the software industry. Now we are.  More than that, we have put more and more effort into it as we were designing the questionnaire and it’s grown into this wonderful piece of research … It  became my baby project.

How has this all started? From a discussion about an ad we had to do for a reseller newsletter. We wanted to produce something different, not just a boring ad… but rather à la @Neil Davidson in his interruption marketing post. Well, we didn’t quite match Napoleon & the Hemorrhoids, nevertheless we did come up with something we believe is very useful and interesting to share with the world.