On: "No, it's less effort than that"

[lelandbatey]

Except a sale is a sale; did they buy it or did they not? There's additional nuance for whether they'll buy again or what support they need going forward, but a sale is still a sale.

A program is not just a program. A bug fix is not just a bug fix. They are not fungible, while sales, definitionally due to the exchange of money, are fungible.

[thfuran → lelandbatey]

Taking a narrow view, maybe. But a sale in a jurisdiction you don’t currently have other customers in could impose significant regulatory burden for relatively little gain. A single 100x sale is very different than 100 1x sales both in overhead you’ll have and in how much leverage the customer will have in the future, etc

[replyifuagree → thfuran]

If we consider that Fungibility is on a continuum of very low on the left and very high on the right. Where do you think most sales fall on the continuum?

I'd claim that businesses are biased toward chasing a highly fungible sales model, to the point of eliminating the need for a salesperson altogether, and so naturally sales tends to the right.

[thfuran → replyifuagree]

That's definitely the sort of thing I'd expect Generic Tech Startup to do, but it certainly isn't standard in every industry. B2B stuff is often a bit bespoke.