Sales should target repeat business, not one-time deals. One-off transactions carry higher risk for both sides and depress price. SaaS succeeds because the ongoing relationship, not the software itself, generates continuous value and trust.
There's an old saying in sales to never sell anything where the customer is not going to come back for more. And that's because relationships are so much more valuable than a one-off transaction. And they're also so much less risky. I mean, consider if you have this one-time transaction, like, I don't know, people selling their company, then the seller is afraid that they're going to get underbid. The buyer is afraid of getting gouged or buying a pig in a poke or what have you. And the, the, the— and that can really hold things up and lead to a deal that actually does have a lower price because of the increased risk that goes along with it. Contrast that with a deal where like we're going to do ongoing business and the first transaction could be relatively small and then we can have another and another. And so like the accumulated investment goes along with the accumulated trust from that ongoing relationship. That to me is the real economic value of something like a SaaS, but it doesn't require the specific mechanism of a SaaS. What it requires is an ongoing relationship to create ongoing value.
