Sales and Distribution have been conflated in my head. They actually require distinct go-to-market motions.
- Sales leans heavily towards one-to-one relationships that you personally hold. This scales with your time and effort.
- Distribution is a one-to-many relationship. It helps people to know you exist without you meeting each one. It scales without your time.
Distribution is about encoding trust into a set of artifacts. It starts with giving away real thinking to someone who may never install your tool or buy your service. Sales grow through a network of people you can meet face to face. Enterprise sales ultimately come through an internal champion that can justify signing a multi-year agreement.
Both Sales and Distribution require a systematic approach. Sales can often be thought of as a funnel. You build a queue of potential prospects, go through early discovery around their needs, show how you can create value, and handle objections along the way. It ends in a signed contract and renewal cadence.
Distribution can be thought of as a loop. You start by educating your audience before you sell, often through content or a freemium product. Along their learning journey, you continue to show up with resources that help them reach their outcome. Over time, a percentage of this audience converts into paying customers and refer others to your product unprompted. This takes time but can reduce your acquisition cost to zero.
Both Sales & Distribution can be thought of as a product. It starts by understanding how your funnel or loop works.
- Think about the atomic unit of your work (e.g. one sales call or one piece of content)
- The cue or cadence of your system (e.g. when this happens, I make a call or post online)
- The feedback loops that keep it running (e.g. we moved one stage further in the sale or saw net new referrals to our content)
The goal is to focus more on building a system you can repeatedly run than brute forcing our way through either. Both require caring about the other person’s outcome more than the sale itself.
