Day 56 - B2B Hangover

I've been selling to businesses (B2B) for waaaaaayyyyy too long. It's usually a long, drawn out process (for enterprise-level software it could range a couple of years) that necessitates a lot of relationship and credibility building. After today, I'm beginning to think I took the long, thorny, uphill path to the ice cream shop instead of the paved, air conditioned one populated by smiling people and their beautiful offspring.

I should have been selling to consumers. (For my seven readers, some of who might not be familiar with marketing, that is commonly abbreviated as B2C.)

Case in point:

Tilling the overflow of my apartment (organizing two closets) yielded a few nuggets of crap. Fortunately, it was crap that I could easily siphon off via Craigslist (what I call eBay without all that auctioning hoopla.) 

Fifty words, one picture and three hours later, I'm in the parking lot of my complex brandishing some DVDs and waiting for $40. As the buyer approaches, I'm working out a strategy, thinking of small talk to build a rapport, maybe bring up the history of the TV series and my ownership of said property ... all those steps you normally consider in a B2B environment (read "tons of extra boot licking for the moola.")

AND ... the whole process took three seconds. Three seconds!

Four words exchanged, three sets of DVDs handed over, two more bills added to the coffers. That easy. 

Yep, I should have gone into B2C.  Definitely.