The manifesto
When the website and the rep sell the same customer, who gets the credit?
Everyone treats channel conflict as a politics problem. It is really a credit problem: when a sale closes, your systems can’t see who earned it, so somebody gets cut out. Credit is something you can build, so direct, dealer, rep, and partner sales grow together instead of fighting.
The real fight
It was never about the order. It was about the credit.
Add a direct-to-customer storefront to a business that runs on reps, dealers, or distributors, and the same fight starts every time.
A customer the rep has called on for three years buys online. The website books the revenue. The rep gets nothing, not because anyone decided that, but because the system couldn’t see that the rep created the relationship. So the rep stops trusting the channel, starts steering customers off it, and the storefront you built to grow direct sales quietly becomes the thing your own team works around. It’s the same story whether it’s a rep, an independent dealer who’s carried your line for years, or a partner who sourced the deal and watched the CRM log it as “direct.”
Every executive answer to this is a negotiation: protected territories, house accounts, split commissions argued case by case. Negotiations don’t scale, and they don’t hold. The next disputed order reopens the whole thing.
You don’t fix a measurement problem with a meeting. You fix it by building a system that knows who earned the sale.
Two ways to handle it
Police the conflict, or design it out
Policing it
Rules, territories, and standing arguments
- Protected territories that the website ignores anyway
- Commission splits negotiated order by order
- Reps steering customers off the channel to keep credit
- A storefront your own sales team quietly undermines
Designing it out
A system that attributes automatically
- Web-created and rep-created deals each carry their own credit, whichever path closes them
- Reps, dealers, and partners credited for the sales they created, online or off
- One credit model every channel actually trusts
- Direct, dealer, and rep sales all growing together
How we design it out
Three moves that end the turf war
Credit every surface
A rep’s tracked link, the account an order maps to, and the source already on the lead: each web, phone, or dealer-portal order records who created the relationship and who closed it, on the CRM and store you already run.
Make the model automatic
Encode the commission and credit rules once, so every disputed order is already settled before anyone walks into a meeting.
Credit the rep, dealer, or partner who earned it
Online or off, the surface that created the sale gets the credit, even a dealer or partner you don’t employ. When the people who sell for you earn on the sales they influence, they sell the channel instead of fighting it.
The engine that makes it measurable
The engine is ours to run, the model is yours to keep
Crediting every surface and paying on it automatically takes an engine built for it: that’s Siren, ours. You don’t become a tech company; we build it and run it on the stack you already have, your order data stays yours, and the model stays yours to keep, never locked in. If you ever want the software itself, that’s Siren.
Start here
Find out exactly who earns each sale across your channels.
A free working session maps every selling surface, shows exactly who earns each sale, and hands you the first move, so you can grow direct without waiting out another turf war. It also covers the disputes already live on your floor, not just future orders.
Free, with no obligation.