Reading a competitor’s channel without buying their data

Operators sometimes ask us to “get the competitor’s customer list.” We will not. Apart from the law, the list is usually the least interesting object. What matters is the route: who stocks, who discounts, who collects, and who is allowed to use the brand on a van.

Start with objects in public. Packing tape on a pallet at a port. A service sticker on a machine in a plant tour you were invited to. Job ads that mention a city you do not sell in yet. Distributor websites that still list a product you thought was exclusive to you. None of this is glamorous. All of it is enough to populate the first column of a channel exception log.

At trade fairs, listen for payment language, not slogans. “Net 90 because their principal in Osaka insists” tells you more than a booth’s LED wall. Ask your own customers who else calls them, and accept that they will lie a little. Triangulate three mild lies and you often get a direction.

The Distributor Diligence Clinic spends a session on this because teams skip it and then grant exclusivity to a partner who already carries a rival. The method is slow on purpose. If a vendor offers you a scraped database, you are not buying insight; you are buying a future argument with counsel.

For the worksheet we use in the room, see the program list. We do not publish the full question set here; it only works when someone answers out loud.