Which routes to market to back, which to leave, and how you will know whether the answer was right.
Most businesses reach their market through several routes at once, and the weight across those routes was set years ago by decisions nobody now remembers. Each channel has an internal owner who can make a strong case for it. None of them is asked to make the case against.
The result is a channel architecture that accumulated rather than one that was chosen, with cross-subsidies inside it that nobody has looked for.
Each channel position is read through the same four lenses: does it pay, does it build recognition, does it open future options, and can this organisation actually run it. The point is that they are read together. A channel that looks healthy alone often looks different beside the one funding it.
The seven channel instructions. Expand. Reallocate. Hold. Trial. Exit. Insource. Reframe. Reallocate is the most common, issued in roughly 31 readings in a hundred. Exit and Insource are rare at about four each. Reframe, the instruction to go back and question the framing, is rarest at around two.
You provide what you already have: revenue and cost by route to market, the contracts sitting behind each one, and whatever customer data exists. Nothing new gets commissioned. If the numbers are more than six months old, the reading says so and leans on them less.
Each channel is then read through four lenses. What it earns once every cost is loaded onto it, not just the invoice margin. Whether customers actually look for you there. What it makes possible later. What could take it away. The four scores combine into a single view per channel, carried with a range that states plainly how sure the reading is. A wide range is an answer in itself: it usually means trial before committing.
What arrives is one instruction per channel, drawn from seven: expand, reallocate, hold, trial, exit, insource or reframe. Each comes with a confidence level, a named owner inside your business, and the date the call will be checked against what actually happened.
Illustrative composites, drawn from the pattern of engagements rather than from any identifiable client. Figures are indicative.
Channel research is overwhelmingly case-based, retrospective, and written by people with no stake in what happens next. Volume VI reads the entire channel architecture prospectively and at once, which is the only way cross-subsidy becomes visible: you cannot detect a subsidy by examining one side of it, and per-channel analysis is structurally incapable of looking at both.
And commercially: it finds the channel quietly paying for the others.
Twelve months after a reading, the instruction is compared against what happened and the result is recorded. For channel work the method is built to a design target of 0.83, drawn from a development cohort of twenty-eight readings. That is a target, not a result, and it will be replaced by the observed figure once the register is running.
A channel reading settles what each of your routes to market actually earns once every cost lands where it belongs, and what to do about each one: a single instruction, a stated confidence, a named owner and a check date. It starts with a conversation, not a document request. You describe the decision in front of you, and Rob reads whether the method fits. If it does not, he will say so. Send one sentence: what is the decision you are trying to make?