Notes for owners · Channel and customer growth
How to onboard a new dealer or distributor
A dealer decides in the first ninety days whether your brand is worth their counter space, and onboarding turns the agreement into the first ten orders.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
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A dealer or distributor decides within about ninety days whether your brand is worth the space, the working capital and the attention it competes for. Onboarding is the work that fills those ninety days: stock they can actually sell, margins in writing, and training for their counter staff. It also means joint calls on the first few customers, and a named person at your end who answers the phone. Appointing a partner and then waiting for orders is the commonest reason channel expansion fails in Indian SMEs. It is almost never the partner's fault.
What the dealer is deciding in those first three months
Not whether your product is good. Whether selling it is easy.
A dealer carries several brands and their own staff decide, order by order, which one to push. That decision is made on margin per unit, effort per sale, and how quickly a query gets answered. A slightly cheaper product with a demonstration unit on the counter, a laminated price list and a sales engineer who answers on the first ring will outsell a better product. That better product loses when it needs a two-day wait for a quotation.
So onboarding is not a formality between the agreement and the revenue. It is the period in which you either make your product the easy one to sell or hand that position to a competitor.
The first ninety days, week by week
| Period | What happens | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Agreement signed, territory and house accounts in writing, margin and payment terms confirmed | Your sales head |
| Week 1 | Catalogue, price list, warranty terms, sample or demonstration set delivered | Your operations |
| Week 2 | Half-day product training for the dealer's counter and field staff, at their premises | Your technical person |
| Week 2 | First stock order placed, small and covering the full range | Dealer, guided by you |
| Weeks 3 to 4 | Three to five joint customer calls with the dealer's salesperson | Your area person |
| Week 4 | Dealer listed on your website with contact details, and their Google listing updated | Your marketing |
| Weeks 5 to 8 | Weekly fifteen-minute call: enquiries received, quotations pending, stock position | Your area person |
| Week 8 | First repeat order, and a review of what is selling and what is not | Both |
| Week 12 | Ninety-day review against agreed expectations, written down | Your sales head |
The rows most SMEs skip are the joint calls and the weekly fifteen-minute call. Those two are where a dealer learns to sell your product and where you learn what the market is saying about it.
What has to be in writing before the first order
Verbal arrangements are the source of almost every channel dispute we see two years later. Put these on paper and give the dealer a copy.
- Dealer margin, and any slab or scheme, with the calculation shown on one example.
- Payment terms, credit limit, and what happens when it is breached.
- Territory, and whether it is exclusive. If it is not, say so plainly now.
- The house-account list: customers you will serve directly, and what the dealer earns when you do.
- Price floor, and the consequence of going below it.
- Warranty, returns and who bears freight on a replacement.
- Service responsibility: who attends a breakdown, within how long, and who pays.
- The single named person at your company the dealer calls, with a mobile number.
A pump manufacturer in Coimbatore, and the dealer who never started
For example, imagine a manufacturer of industrial pumps in Coimbatore appointing a dealer in Vijayawada. The details and figures are illustrative. The agreement was signed, a stock order of ₹6 lakh was despatched, a catalogue was couriered, and everybody waited.
Nothing happened for four months. When the sales manager finally visited, they found the stock still boxed. The dealer's two salesmen had never been trained, and could not answer a customer's question about head and discharge without calling Coimbatore. They had also learned that the call took two days to be returned. So when a customer walked in asking for a pump, they sold the brand they understood.
The recovery took one week of work that should have happened in week two. A half-day training at the dealer's premises used a cut-section model and a one-page selection chart laminated for the counter. A named engineer gave his mobile number. Four joint calls followed, on customers the dealer already supplied. The first orders came from those four calls, and the dealer's own staff started quoting because they had seen it done.
Signs in the first month that onboarding is going wrong
The dealer has not placed a second order and has not asked a single technical question. Silence from a new partner is not comfort, it is a warning.
Their salespeople have not met anyone from your company. Training delivered to the proprietor alone reaches nobody who talks to customers.
Enquiries the dealer forwards are being answered slowly by your team. A dealer who waits two days for a quotation twice will stop forwarding.
Your own website does not list them. A buyer who searches your brand and their city and finds nothing calls a competitor's dealer instead.
What to do next
Write the ninety-day plan once, as a single page, and use it for every partner you appoint. Then check your existing dealers against it, because the ones who went quiet in year one usually never received weeks two to four. A dormant dealer who was never trained is often cheaper to revive than a new one is to appoint.
