Hello, community.  We need your help.  We use various channel partners (distributors, so to speak) to reach the end customer.  In our case, they are usually broker/consultants.  Anyway, we are trying to decide between 3 different ways of entering Opportunities in Salesforce in order to account for how we sell through these brokers.

1. Currently, we set up an Account for the Broker (Channel Partner) and an Account for the end customer or Employer Group that Broker is bringing to us.  We set up the opportunity under the Employer Group Account.  Then we tie the Opportunity back to the Broker contact through the use of the Contact Role on the Opportunity we created at the Employer Group Account.  One of several challenges with this is that we don't seem to be able to identify opportunities at the Broker Account level since the Contact Role ties the Opportunity to the Contact underneath the Broker Account.  Also, this way means the sales person has to add a Contact Role to each opportunity after creating it.
2. We thought about creating a Parent-Child relationship between the Broker Account and the Employer Group Account with the Broker Account being the parent of the Employer Group they bring us.  That enables us to run a report on the Broker Account level and pick up all opportunities under any Child Accounts.  However, it doesn't change the fact that we still would have to create 2 accounts, which is tedious.
3. Some in our group have suggested that we put the Opportunity under the Broker Account and don't create a separate Employer Group Account.  The advantage to them with this approach is that the Opportunity is associated right away with the Channel Partner who brought it to us, in this case the broker.  One negative is that if the Employer Group leaves Broker #1 and goes to Broker #2, then we don't have all the information and records related to that Employer Group in one place, namely under the Employer Group Account.

We'd appreciate anyone's advice and/or experience related to these approaches.  Or if you have a different way to suggest, that's great, too.

Thanks for your help,

Gregg