Startups: Tools Are Bought, Transformations Are Sold

Okay, now the thing we were selling, this is, we were selling this thing called inbound marketing, and this is not a HubSpot sales pitch, so I'm not gonna tell you about inbound marketing. What I am gonna tell you is that what we were selling is this kind of new approach to marketing. It was a kind of philosophical transformative change. Which brings me to sales and marketing. There are 2 kinds of things in the world. One are like simple things that people understand. If you have a tool that's an existing category, other people already have it, some of the potential customers already use something else, you can put a website up and a credit card form up and it's like, oh, I have this tool, it does this thing in this category. You might be using another tool, ours is better, try it out for 30 days. and if you like it, pay, and you can get customers without ever having carbon-based life forms interact with each other, right? You can actually do that. That's possible. As it turns out, on the other end of the spectrum, when what you are selling is almost a religion change that says, oh, by the way, everything you thought you knew about marketing is kind of wrong, and you need to change it and do it this other way, which is what we were pitching, that's what would be called a transformative sale. As it turns out, no number of brilliant blog articles from me or my co-founder were going to be enough to put up on the web and someone says, oh yeah, these guys are right, inbound marketing, that's the way to go, here's my money. That doesn't happen because we're asking for this massive change in their mindset, and so that required people. So we built out a marketing and inbound inside sales machine over the years. I gotta take a deep breath, are you doing okay here, Jason? I'm very entertained.