The work
Five instruments
Each one starts with a question somebody is avoiding, and measures the behavior underneath it rather than the feeling on top of it.
The ongoing measures
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Is your channel loyal?
Are they leading with your product?
Channel Health Index
Index wave
Whether the distributors that carry your line will pull it without being asked, measured distributor by distributor and role by role.
One scored card per distributor, a network heatmap that separates a company problem from a branch problem, and 3 lists: protect, fix, replace or constrain.
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Are you going to lose your best people?
Can they sell the line if they stay?
Specialist Health Index
Index wave
Whether the people carrying your line are equipped to sell it, measured against a stated position rather than against what a manager hopes the team is.
A profile for each person, a team rollup for the company, and a debrief with whoever runs the force. No file that ties scores to names.
Bought by the same person, out of the same budget, usually in the same conversation. Run once to find out where you stand, then again each year to find out whether anything you did worked.
Before the appointment
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When you are appointing, adding a territory, consolidating, or explaining a partner who looks fine on paper
Will this distributor work the way your line requires?
Which manufacturers do their people already reward?
Channel Fit
One distributor
What 14 branches and 220 million dollars in revenue cannot tell you. Whether the organization can support the channel model your line actually requires.
An organizational readiness profile, a map of the manufacturers their people already reward, brand preference broken out by function, and a written implication for your line.
One distributor rather than a network, and the only instrument that looks at the competitors already on the card.
The deeper cuts
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When the card is strange and you need the cause
What do they say when you leave the room?
Why did they stop calling?
Voice of Customer / Voice of the Channel
Interview project
What CHI cannot reach. Unusual scores, lost quotes, and the distributors that will not promote you, interviewed when another questionnaire will not get underneath the card.
Five objects: how each role decides, the language they use when nobody is selling to them, the proof they trust, what you should stop saying, and a short brief somebody can act on without a translator. Not a 40 page deck. A short brief and the verbatim appendix behind it.
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When you need the room to tell the truth before anyone goes home
Can you stand to hear it in one day?
Will you let someone else run the room?
Gunslinger
A session and an analysis
A day built to break the process on purpose, so it can be rebuilt to hold. Recorded properly, analyzed properly, and reported as findings rather than as impressions.
A same-day capture of the route map and the ranked breaks in the room's own words, then a written analysis inside 10 business days: themes, the splits between roles, cleared verbatims, and the protect, fix, and stop-funding list with owners and 90 day tests.
The interview project is what you run when the meter cannot tell you why. The Gunslinger day is how you get in without a six month program.
How they fit together
Route by the decision in front of you. If you are appointing, adding a territory, or consolidating, Channel Fit comes first. If the network is already in place, the Channel Health Index is what gets run and then re-run each year, timed to land before line review. The Specialist Health Index answers the question the channel index raises and does not settle. The interview project is bought when a scored card is strange and another questionnaire will not get underneath it. The Gunslinger day is how a room says out loud what the scores already showed.
They are sold separately and none of them requires the others. They are worth more in sequence, which is a different claim.
On provenance, because the two are not the same claim. The Channel Health Index was fielded between 2024 and 2025 across 3 corporations and 50 industrial distributor and rep agency organizations, and the paper describing that work is under peer review. It is a fielded study rather than a published norm. The grit research behind the Specialist Health Index is forthcoming in the Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering. Under review and forthcoming mean different things and are kept separate here on purpose.