In this article I am talking about marketing channels and offering 20 discussion questions for managers to audit and plan channels for a specific company in the coming years. Marketing channels are the linkage among companies and clients. It involves the group of agents that perform services to make products available.

When a company produces an offer, for this to reach final consumers, some agents need to perform the flows of products, services, communications, financial, information, among others.

Like an orchestra, a company should coordinate its marketing channels in order to build sustainable competitive advantage. It is one of the most difficult variables to change in the marketing mix of a company.

With the advance of web sales and new forms of purchasing and distributing, we face e new era where marketing channels are even stronger.

A frame is offered for discussions towards the needs of an organization to plan and act driven by demand in the distribution of its products and services. Here follows the 20 auditing and planning questions:

1 - How is the marketing channel structured today, which are the participants?

2 - What is the percentage of sales in each channel used by a company?

3 - What are the margins the company has in each channel?

4 - What services are offered and by which participants in each channel?

5 - What are the margins of the agents in each of the channels?

6 - Which available channels are not used until this moment by the company and for what reasons?

7 - How the macro-environmental variables, being the political/legal; economic; socio-cultural and technological changes are affecting and will affect different channels in the future?

8 - What are the trends (concentration/internalization) and attractiveness of each channel at this moment and at the future?