Abundance, Sales & Startups

2017-03-30

This is an excerpt of my Audio post. List to the entire story here

The way I look at it, as the internet gets the cost of distribution to zero and compute solutions from Amazon and Google get cost of starting up to zero, there is a rise in products that do the same thing, i.e. abundance
Due to abundance, competition is very high. In such a high competition environment, it is hard to grow. My biggest learning in such an environment was, marketing is way more important than sales.
Reason 1: The internet has flipped the buyer model. People inherently search for solutions for a problem and self-select a product.
Reason 2: Until a problem is not important enough to be solved, people don't want a solution. So, sending your best sales guys to such a prospect won't help
Another point to note is that more solutions move towards a freemium/Free to try products, sales teams loose as they are inherently are in conflict with the model
In such a scenario, the job of marketing then becomes 2-fold

Make people aware the problem exists, which is where content plays a massive part
Make people aware there is a solution, which is their product

All this makes your branding efforts all the more important, in the world abundance, users are loyal to the brands