Go-to-market plans need to be constantly monitored.  Influences can change suddenly.  Companies must be prepared to deal with typical issues such as new competition, price erosion, purchasing slowdowns, and atypical issues such as legislative changes, component obsolescence, or standards shifts.  Different metrics must be employed to assess the profitability of an indirect channel. 

Reseller Limitations

You must be aware of the influence of your reseller base on your evolving strategy.  A strategic change in your product focus includes a reset of the channel component.  It can be painful and costly to make significant changes.  There are contractual issues, training costs, customer ownership issues, etc.  Your product strategy planning needs to take these costs into account.    

Supplier Constraints

Reseller projections are less reliable and unanticipated reseller sales, while welcome, can put a strain on product availability and direct vs channel departments.  This impact is especially painful when a company is managing their inventory closely and the company is not the supplier's best customer.  What does a company do given a choice of fulfilling a key account order or a VAR order?  What measure do you use to factor this issue into your profitability picture?

Market Coverage 

An advantage of an indirect channel is their focus on the 80% of the total market that your key account team does not focus on.  Of course, they are focusing on the top 20% of that market.  So, your 20% plus their 16% means that 64% of your total market is underserved.  Can an indirect channel program profitably address this issue?

Program Metrics

How do you measure the effectiveness of a lead campaign when the leads are allocated to your reseller partners?  How do you define effectiveness?  What are you trying to measure? Is it profitability, or reseller prospecting ability?  The metric  can be the sales cycle time or the percent of leads followed up on.  A traditional measure such as percent close rate can be used.  Gaining visibility into some metrics is difficult.  How do you account for cost of sales?  Do you count the Marketing departments time to generate the lead campaign?  Or does that come out of the Marketing departments budget?