A local reseller wants to carry your product. The pitch is always reach: their list, their relationships, their people out selling while you build. Before you work out the margin, work out what reach actually means in a country this size.

This is about selling through partners inside New Zealand, and only inside New Zealand. The offshore version, including whether to go direct at all, is direct or partners, and I am not re-arguing it here. The domestic question is different because the market is a different shape.

MBIE's small business factsheet, built on the Stats NZ Business Demography Survey, counts 617,334 businesses in New Zealand. Of those, 455,730 have no employees at all and 600,051 have fewer than 20. Subtract, and 17,283 businesses in the whole country employ 20 or more people. If you sell B2B software at a four or five figure annual price, that number less the industries you do not serve is close to your entire domestic market. That is a list you could buy. It is not a market you need an army to cover.

Reach is not what you are buying

Offshore, a partner sells you access you genuinely cannot get: a market you cannot fly to every month, a buyer who will not sign with a supplier that has no local presence. At home that gap is narrow. Your reseller is calling the same 17,000 companies you could call.

So you are buying one of three other things. Coverage, meaning someone works the accounts your one or two sellers will never reach this year. Credibility, meaning the buyer already trusts a name you have not earned, which matters in councils, health and primary sector co-operatives. Or completion, meaning your product is one component of something larger and the customer wants a single invoice.

If you cannot say in one sentence which of the three you are buying, you are giving away margin for nothing.

You pay acquisition once. You pay a channel discount on every invoice, for as long as the customer stays.

Run the margin arithmetic on your own numbers

No reseller margin is correct in the abstract, and any number quoted at you as the going rate is describing someone else's business. Do the sum instead.

Acquiring a customer directly costs you something once: the time, the travel, the proposal, the pilot. A channel discount costs you something every month, for the life of the account. Past a certain number of renewals the partner deal becomes the more expensive way of winning the same customer. That crossover is a ten minute sum on your own cost to acquire and your own retention, and most founders have never done it.

Two things make the sum worse. The partner usually has the stronger claim on the renewal, because they hold the relationship. And the discount that wins your first partner becomes the floor for the second.

The deals you should never hand over

Keep your reference accounts. The customers who take reference calls, host site visits and appear in your case studies have to be yours, because a partner cannot hand over a relationship they own when you need it most.

Keep anything where the implementation is the product. If the value lands through configuration, data work or change management only your team does well, a partner in the middle takes blame for a delivery they cannot control, and you take the churn.

Keep the sectors you are still learning. The accounts that teach you what your product should become are worth more as teachers than as revenue, and you learn nothing through an intermediary.

What has your partner actually got to do to earn the margin?

Write the obligations down before the first deal rather than after the third. A workable minimum: a named person inside their business who owns your product, an agreed number for the year, deal registration so you both know who is working what, a quarterly joint plan, and training completed rather than scheduled.

None of that is onerous for a partner who intends to sell. It is only onerous for one who intends to sit on the agreement, which is the point of asking.

The quiet failure, and how to stay out of it

The arrangement that hurts most is not the partner who sells badly. It is the one who neither sells nor lets go. They signed two years ago, they carry your logo on a website, they bring you two opportunities a year, and they hold a sector you now feel awkward about selling into yourself.

In a market of 17,283 businesses with 20 or more staff, an exclusive grip on a sector is a visible fraction of everything you will ever sell at home. Fixed terms, written performance minimums and a clean exit are not hostility. They are what keeps the decision reversible, which is what you want this early.

So, before you sign: if your best domestic partner brought you nothing at all next year, could you name the customers you would not be allowed to go and win yourself?

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Sources. Business counts: MBIE, "Small business and manufacturing fact sheets" (2026 edition, small business factsheet), which reports 617,334 New Zealand businesses, of which 455,730 have zero employees, 101,253 have 1 to 5 employees and 43,068 have 6 to 19, and states that 97.2 percent of businesses are small businesses with fewer than 20 employees. That factsheet is built on the Stats NZ Business Demography Survey, and Stats NZ separately reports 617,330 enterprises at February 2025 on a provisional basis. The 17,283 figure is my own subtraction from the MBIE table and nothing else: 455,730 plus 101,253 plus 43,068 is 600,051 businesses under 20 employees, and 617,334 less 600,051 leaves 17,283 with 20 or more. I have used the MBIE table throughout rather than mixing it with the Stats NZ release, because the two differ by four enterprises on different vintages and the arithmetic has to come from one source to mean anything. A business count is not an addressable market: it covers every industry, so your own number is smaller again. I have deliberately not quoted a standard New Zealand reseller margin, because no published survey measures one and a figure repeated in the trade press is not a primary source. The three reasons to use a domestic partner, the crossover test between acquisition cost and channel discount, the accounts to keep direct, the partner obligations and the exclusivity warning all come from my own work with New Zealand B2B tech founders rather than from published data.

Nick Burns is a fractional CRO for New Zealand B2B tech companies, at home and expanding internationally. He co-founded Emendo and sold it to McKesson, then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500, and has since helped 60+ tech companies grow sales.