Because "The Channel' sales model provides all sorts of strange incentives from vendor reps through to end users. Everyone is playing everyone off everyone. Le

Because "The Channel' sales model provides all sorts of strange incentives from vendor reps through to end users. Everyone is playing everyone off everyone. Lets say there's two solutions that would solve my end users problem equally well. Both have list prices of 10K, both have normal disty cost of 7K, but brand X is running a promo where I get a 50% off front end discount from disty, but brand y is not. Now I call the customer up and let them know that not only is brand X the best solution, but because of my great relationship with brand x I've secured them a 20% discount off list. So now the customer is getting what they need cheaper and I've got more margin in the deal, which is what my commision is calculated out of. So essentially when vendors do this they're not trying to make things cheaper for the customer to increase demand, they're trying to make sure that their products put the most money in sales people's pockets so that sales people will push their stuff the hardest. Though on this specific occasion I was following the letter (or lack thereof) of the promotion, but certainly not the spirit. Grabbing existing demand vs generating new demand.