Blog Insights

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2009 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Do you sell business-related products or services through a channel? And by “channel,” I mean another party between you and the end customer/consumer/user. Channels could include retailers or dealers or be multi-level with distributors involved.

I went to pick up my daughter from kindergarten yesterday and ran headlong into a master merchandiser who I both respect professional and loathe personally – Scholastic. If you have a child and have ever experienced their traveling book fair, you know exactly what I mean.

I want my child to read, and I want her to love books – especially the kind made from paper.  So of course I want to buy her a couple of books to encourage this and support the school. What I didn't want was the tears that come with the “books with enclosed toys” which I decline to purchase.

I love this idea but is there a demand for this new product or service? Will someone buy it? For most small business owners and entrepreneurs, this is the question they ask when presented with an idea – either their own or someone else’s.

In our last post on differentiation, Michelle made the simple, elegant, and poignantly clear statement that to have differentiation, you have to be different. Now you may read this and say “duh,” but to get there, for most businesses, is truly hard. In fact, one of the hardest things you will ever do.

One of the best articles/posts I have read in a long time about web marketing/sales is The Penny Gap by Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital. I am an old-school marketer relearning my craft in the social media, always on, web world.  In the old days of the 1980s, we learned a lot about pricing as part of the marketing mix and especially the concept of price elasticity (volume goes up as price goes down - to a point of diminishing returns).  The web has turned these economics on their head (or at least their side), and Josh does a great job of looking at this from the VC point of view.  It's worth the read...   Think about how this applies to you in a business-to-business marketing world - especially if you market to small businesses.