Use case — channel partner mapping

Every partner your channel could hold, mapped from the entire active web

Integrators, resellers, distributors and service partners don't register anywhere central. We enumerate them from 100M+ classified domains, screened against your channel thesis with quoted evidence for every call.

100M+
Classified domains
700+
Industry categories
15
Signals per company

Partner archetypes we surface

Systems integrators Independent distributors Authorized resellers Certified service centers Field-service specialists Calibration labs Aftermarket repair shops Rental & fleet operators

Each archetype is identified from what the company's own site documents — authorizations, program language, service claims — never from a purchased directory.

300+ enterprise organisations run on our data One of Europe's largest telecom operators Adtech & cybersecurity platforms A leading airline metasearch
The problem

Channels are built from companies nobody indexed

A territory's real partner population is dominated by small, founder-run operations. They don't buy trade-show booths, many never join an association, and a surprising share never use the category keyword you would search for.

If you run channel development for an OEM, your map of a region is usually three sources deep: the partners you already have, an association member list, and whatever an analyst found in a week of searching.

If you are an investor consolidating a fragmented service channel, the problem is identical — the acquirable population is unlisted, and the listed slice is the most-contacted slice.

The visible-slice trap: profile-based databases index companies they previously found. A shop with an outdated site, no marketing budget and forty superb technicians is exactly the partner you never see.
What it costs: a fifth or more of confirmed fits in our industrial runs never use the category's obvious homepage keywords. Keyword-first sourcing silently forfeits them to whoever looks harder.
The compounding error: every recruitment cycle built on the same three sources contacts the same over-contacted firms, then concludes the territory is saturated. The territory usually isn't — the source list is.
The method

From the whole web to a verified channel map

Leading company databases index the companies they found. We start from the entire active web — 100M+ classified domains covering 99.99%+ of active internet usage — and run LLM analysis against your exact partner thesis. The full mechanics are on the method page.

1

Universe

Every domain in the relevant categories. One industrial category alone holds 367,478 domains globally before any filtering begins.

2

Triage pass

A fast screen removes parked, dead and out-of-scope sites. A 25,000-domain US triage typically leaves ~17,300 live operating companies.

3

Partner-evidence extraction

The deep pass reads each surviving site against your thesis and extracts partner evidence verbatim — with the source URL for every claim.

Re-runs included: once the universe exists, we re-screen any subset against a revised partner profile — a new region, a stricter authorization bar — without rebuilding from scratch.
What we extract

Six partner-fit criteria, read from the company's own site

Every criterion below is captured as a quoted claim, not a guess. If the evidence isn't on the site, the field ships empty and says so.

01

Authorizations & certifications

OEM authorizations, UL 508A panel-shop status, ISO/IEC 17025 scopes, ASME stamps, distributor agreements — captured as the exact claim text the company publishes.

02

Service footprint

Headquarters, branches and the stated service radius. Owned locations are distinguished from partner mentions, so territory coverage is real, not inflated.

03

Recurring programs

Maintenance agreements, scheduled service programs, consumables and rental fleets — the language of repeat revenue that separates a project shop from a durable partner.

04

Named principals

Who is actually identifiable as a decision-maker, and how far the visible bench extends beyond one or two names on an about page.

05

Vertical exposure

End markets evidenced by case studies and named customer industries — documented exposure, not categories guessed from a keyword on the homepage.

06

Independence

Whether the company already belongs to a group or runs its own acquisition program. Roughly one in ten keyword-perfect candidates turns out to be group-owned already.

Evidence discipline

Every partner claim arrives as a quote you can audit

A channel map you can't verify is a rumor with formatting. Our deliverables attach a verbatim snippet and source URL to every inclusion — and, just as deliberately, to every exclusion.

That discipline is why the map survives contact with your first outreach wave. When a candidate answers the phone, your team already knows what the company says about itself.

  • Verbatim snippets with page-level source references
  • Exclusions documented with the disqualifying quote
  • Insufficient-evidence cases flagged honestly, never forced into a bucket

From an automation-channel specimen

Target A-01“UL 508A — Industrial Control Panels Certification for USA” · founder-led, Texas, recurring offerings documented
Target A-02“the founder established the company in 1981” · “Our salespeople are engineers” · five Indiana locations
Target A-03“co-owned by two fourth-generation families” · “launched their joint venture in 1996” · robotic palletizing systems, Washington state
Excluded — one candidate matched every keyword, then its news page disclosed a group acquisition. Removed, with the disclosing quote preserved in the exclusion log.

Labels anonymized for the public site. Client deliverables carry full names, URLs and verified snippets per company.

The base layer

The map is only as good as the universe under it

Channel mapping inherits everything from coverage. These are the numbers the screen starts from — before your thesis removes everything that doesn't belong.

0
Classified domains
0
Business & finance sites
0
Industry categories
0
Signals per company
Where this works

Channel categories we have screened at population scale

From one US-focused industrial run: eligible independent companies per subvertical, after triage and group-ownership exclusions. These are counted populations, not estimates.

Precision machining — 702 Equipment repair — 545 Automation integration — 534 Material handling — 513 Compressed air — 276 Calibration & testing — 254 Water treatment — 221 Boiler & steam — 172 Filtration — 109 Surface finishing — 93

The same architecture applies to software resellers, managed-service providers, installation networks and any other channel whose members describe themselves on their own websites. B2B and commercial-side trades only — the exclusions are listed on our standards page.

The alternatives

Three ways to build a partner map, honestly compared

Each column is a legitimate tool. Only one of them starts from the full population.

DimensionDirectory / database exportAssociation member listFull-web channel map
Starting populationCompanies the vendor previously foundCompanies that chose to joinEvery active domain in category — 100M+ classified
The quiet operatorsSystematically missingMostly missingIncluded — a fifth of fits lack obvious keywords
Authorization evidenceA tag, source unknownMembership onlyExact claim text plus source URL
Group-ownership screenRarely currentNot trackedExplicit — ~1 in 10 candidates excluded as group-owned
Custom partner thesisFixed filtersNot applicablePlain-language thesis, re-runs included
Exclusion audit trailNoneNoneEvery rejection documented with its reason
Signal deep-dives

The signals that matter most when the thesis is a channel

Our framework reads 15 signals per company. Four of them carry most of the weight in partner mapping.

Partner & channel ecosystem position

Ecosystem signal

Named OEM partnerships, distributorships, buying-group and association memberships — read from the site, quoted exactly. For an OEM this answers whether a firm is committed to a competitor's program, genuinely independent, or multi-line; for an investor it maps brand concentration that shapes integration risk and pricing power after close.

Recurring-offering indicators

Durability signal

Service contracts, preventive-maintenance programs, calibration cycles, rental fleets — a partner with documented recurring programs has operational discipline and customer stickiness that a project-only shop lacks. In our industrial runs this language is one of the strongest separators between durable partners and firms that live quote to quote.

Compliance & regulated-market readiness

Qualification signal

Explicit certifications only: UL 508A for panel builders, ISO/IEC 17025 scopes for calibration labs, ASME stamps for pressure work, NADCAP for aerospace processes. We capture the exact claim text rather than a boolean, because scope matters — an accreditation restricted to one discipline describes a different partner than a broad scope held for a decade.

Geographic & branch footprint

Territory signal

Channel planning is territory planning. We record headquarters, each stated branch, and the claimed service radius — distinguishing owned locations from partner name-drops. Laid over your existing coverage, the map shows where the territory is thin, where partners cluster, and which single-location firms sit in the gaps you need filled.

Founder-led / family-led association

Continuity signal

Explicit founder or family language on the site — “second generation”, “founder-led”, “family-owned” — never inferred, roughly half of confirmed industrial fits carry it. For channel work it matters twice: OEMs learn who signs a partnership agreement, and investors learn which firms match the founder-associated, independently positioned profile most buy-and-build theses specify.

Two readers, one map

What OEMs and investors each take from the same deliverable

The evidence base doesn't change; the reading does. Four teams pull four different decisions out of one channel map, which is why the map ships with every extracted field rather than a pre-baked ranking alone.

OEM channel development

The full population of candidate partners in a territory, ranked against your program's bar: authorizations held, competing commitments, service depth, named principals to approach. Recruitment stops being a referrals business.

Buy-and-build investors

The acquirable channel, with group-owned firms already excluded and founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned businesses flagged from explicit site language. Platform and add-on candidates come from the same evidence base.

Partner-program managers

A defensible answer to “how many certified shops exist in this region?” — with the certification language quoted, so program targets rest on counted populations rather than analyst estimates.

Corporate development teams

Overlap analysis between an acquisition target's claimed dealer network and the real population — useful diligence when a seller's channel story is central to the price. Related: supplier & specialist discovery.

In your workflow

From delivered map to signed partners

The deliverable is a ranked, evidenced CSV plus per-company dossiers. Here is how channel teams typically run it.

1

Load and segment

Import into your CRM with our scores intact — Mandate Fit weighted 70%, Outreach Suitability 20%, Transition Context 10%, zeroed out on group ownership. Segment by territory gap and archetype.

2

Brief the field team

Each candidate carries its evidence snippets, so regional managers open conversations knowing the company's certifications, service lines and named principals.

3

Run the outreach wave

Work the ranked list top-down. Exclusion documentation prevents wasted calls to group-owned firms or single-brand shops committed elsewhere.

4

Re-screen as the thesis sharpens

After the first wave teaches you what a great partner looks like, we re-run the universe against the refined profile. Custom re-runs are included in every engagement.

5

Report with counted populations

Board updates and mandate reviews cite the actual population per territory — how many eligible partners exist, how many were approached, how many remain — instead of coverage guesses.

What this does not do

Honest limits, stated up front

A channel map built from website evidence is bounded by what companies publish. Three limits worth knowing before you buy.

No private data: we never estimate revenue, margins or deal terms, and we don't profile owners. If a fact isn't published by the company, it isn't in the map.
No intent claims: we cannot tell you which partners want a new OEM line or which owners would entertain an offer. No website signal supports that, so we refuse to fake it.
Sparse sites stay uncertain: some excellent firms publish almost nothing. We flag them as insufficient-evidence — the specimen format reserves 2 of 20 slots for exactly these — rather than guessing.
Partner map, not lead list

“A lead list answers ‘who might buy?’. A partner map answers ‘who exists, what do they hold, and who owns them?’ — a population inventory with an audit trail, not contacts to burn. Only one of these survives scrutiny in a mandate review: the one whose every row traces to a quote.”

Engagement shapes

Start with a proof, scale to monitoring

A proof project from €4,900 screens one channel category in one territory. The full universe with deep shortlist runs from €9,900, and annual monitoring — new entrants, ownership changes, lost authorizations — from €18,000 per thesis. Custom ICP re-runs are included at every tier.

Our standards: no seller-intent flags, no financial estimates, no owner profiling, and no engagements in consumer-captive verticals. Read the full standards.
Questions we hear

Channel mapping, answered plainly

How is this different from exporting a partner list from a company database?

An export gives you the companies the database previously indexed, filtered by tags whose provenance you can't check. We enumerate the population from the full active web, screen it against your written thesis, and attach the quoted evidence behind every inclusion and every exclusion.

The difference shows up at the edges — the quiet, keyword-poor operators that exports structurally miss. In channel work the edges are usually the point, because the visible middle has already been called by everyone.

Can you tell us which partners would switch to our program?

No, and we would be skeptical of anyone who claims to. Willingness to switch is not a website-visible fact, and pretending otherwise would poison every claim we can actually support.

What we can document is current commitments — named brand relationships, exclusivity language, multi-line positioning. That record tells your field team where a conversation is plausible and where it is probably wasted effort.

How do you handle companies that are partners and competitors at once?

We don't collapse them into one bucket. Each company's service lines, brand relationships and manufacturing activities are extracted separately, so a distributor that also builds competing panels appears with both facts quoted. You decide what disqualifies; the map just refuses to hide the tension.

What does a first engagement look like in practice?

You write your partner thesis in plain language — archetypes, territory, minimum authorizations, disqualifiers. We run the two-pass screen and deliver a ranked universe with per-company evidence.

Engagements typically open with a 20-company specimen in the 8 top fits / 5 keyword-missed / 5 documented exclusions / 2 insufficient-evidence format, so you can audit our judgment on real companies before scaling to the full territory.

How current is the map a year after delivery?

Channels churn — firms get acquired, authorizations lapse, new entrants appear. Annual monitoring re-screens the universe on a schedule and delivers deltas: what entered, what left, what changed ownership. If you only buy once, the map is a snapshot and we say so.

Which geographies can you cover?

The domain universe is global; screening is bounded only by where companies maintain websites. Multi-country channel maps are common — the thesis simply gains a territory clause per region, and results are delivered segmented so regional teams work their own slices.

Map the channel you can't currently see

Send us your territory and partner profile. We'll show you a specimen channel map — evidence, exclusions and all — before you commit to anything.