The role of a distributor

Distributors are a role that for me it's hard to fully place in the value chain of startups making scientific products. On the one hand, they can be good at lowering the Resistance to the sales pitch, since they represent different companies and solutions, they may be perceived as less biased in the information they provide.

On the other hand, small companies can't deal with the entire sales cycle across geographies. In France, for example, trying to sell without speaking French is extremely hard. Having a local person understanding the local idiosyncrasies is going to reach far. A distributor hedges their risks across many solutions on given fields.

If one product does not work (Objections to purchase) they'll have another. In the end, their incentive is to close sales, not to close sales on a given product.

They also have access to market information that it's very hard to acquire. Thanks to their broad offering, they see patterns that only very big companies could perceive.

The thing with distributors is that for B2C products they are normally the "retailers", the ones who buy in bulk and send in units. But for scipreneurs, a distributor in a B2B context is just an intermediary