Also, I don't know, wouldn't somebody who built a sales channel (whatever that is) in the past have done so with completely outdated methods? Presumably fax machines and telephones?
A sales channel is a system of business relationships through which you sell your product; for instance, partnerships with consulting firms and VARs that themselves have salespeople. An agreement with Best Buy would be a channel relationship. AT&T is key channel for Apple.
The methods you use to build a channel largely revolve around meetings with other companies, so, no, I don't think age matters as much as knowing how to sell a product to a reseller; how that deal is structured (markups, inventory, spiffs for hitting numbers, sales support, subsidized marketing, &c), how you generate and groom channel leads (pilot programs, pull-through from shared direct customers, tie-ins to services or 3rd party products, &c).
Channel sales managers are more like bizdev than like salespeople (although really, bizdev, channel, and account manager salespeople all share most of the same DNA).
Maybe, but for example, perhaps today completely different things matter? In the past perhaps it was important to get on TV or cooperate with some supermarket chain, whereas today you should have a billion Facebook followers and be pushed by Amazon.
Just playing devil's advocate, anyway... I am all for senior people, getting old myself...
Also, I don't know, wouldn't somebody who built a sales channel (whatever that is) in the past have done so with completely outdated methods? Presumably fax machines and telephones?
1) There have been largish successful organisations built since the web was invented ;-)
2) Lots of pre-web skills skills are transferable to more modern technologies. Most of the work in creating and building sales channels - especially internationally - is understanding people relationships, legal issues, managing recruiting and scaling of organisations not code, etc.
3) There are domains where large multinational organisations are still built using telephones, personal relationships and boots on the ground. If you're looking to build the next Oracle or SAP a bunch of retweets and facebook likes are not going to help.
Maybe if they built it 25 years ago. People that did said thing 10 or 15 years ago I'd think would have used similar methods that could be updated easily. 10 years ago was only 2002.
