An agent and a marketplace are not alternatives, and confusing them is expensive

The question we are asked most often is whether a marketplace replaces the sales network. The answer is no, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.

The two do different jobs, and it is worth separating them precisely, because that is where you see who belongs where.

An agent builds trust. They walk into a practice, they understand how that professional works, they notice a material change being considered before it is mentioned. In equipment, where a decision is worth thousands and needs a trial, that work is irreplaceable.

An agent also defends. When a competitor appears in front of a long-standing customer, it is the relationship that holds them, not the price.

An online catalogue does none of this. It builds no relationships and defends no customers.

It does two things an agent cannot, for physical reasons before economic ones.

The first is being in several places at once. Thirty provinces, twenty-seven countries, at any hour. An agent is in one place at a time and sleeps at night.

The second is handling the reorder that does not warrant a visit. A box of gloves at eighty euros does not justify anyone's time, but multiplied across three hundred practices it becomes real revenue.

Companies that use both end up dividing the work in almost exactly the same way.

The agent holds the large customers, the equipment, and the areas where volume supports their presence. The online channel covers routine reordering, distant provinces, foreign countries and products that need no explanation.

The conflict that people fear — the marketplace cannibalising the agent — arises when the same product goes to the same customer at a different price. That is a pricing management error, not a flaw in the channel.

With an aligned price list, the two channels reach different people and neither takes anything from the other. It is why it pays to start with the uncovered areas: there the conflict does not exist by definition.

In summary: an agent builds trust and defends long-standing customers, a catalogue does neither, the catalogue is in several places at once and handles the reorder that warrants no visit, companies using both divide by customer and product type, and the conflict comes from misaligned prices rather than from the channel.