One of the more obvious but less articulated aspect of business is that of “sales channels.” Sales channels are mediums in which a product or service is distributed. Some examples are the following:
- Brick and Mortar Retail – Think of a Target Store, a Dunkin’, something that you have to physically go to
- Digital – Accessed through a digital device that can receive the communication (we will get into this later)
- Snail Mail – Your mailbox
When assessing a company or opportunity, these sales channels are the avenues in which the actual sale will be made. Throughout the analysis of financial documents by company, we will go into sales channels quite a bit.
The channels I have listed above are also quite broad as you may have already deduced. Digital is a wide spectrum of media, including videos, video games, music, and digital documents. This can be narrowed even further.
Not all digital devices can handle all types of media. A flip phone without high speed data capabilities cannot efficiently handle Netflix, but it can handle digital communication like SMS.
As this blog grows, we will elaborate on this concept in regard to the world around us and make sense of what about sales channels are pushed onto us by monopolistic tendencies and what aren’t. The iPhone, or a smart phone, which was not widely around before 2007, was not always the primary channel through which media and work was consumed.
How has this changed our world? There definitely have and will be some great outcomes, but over 15 years of a focus on one sales channel may have left out a great deal of investment and advancement elsewhere.