It can vary based on the product's target customers.

To have a viable business, the total net profit that the company earns from a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, CLV) should be bigger than the amount spent to acquire the customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC).

It starts from co...

Work for low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral marketing.

A laundry detergent company can't afford to pay salespeople to go door-to-door, but instead pays salespeople to talk to grocery chains since one deal might mean 100.000 bottles sold.

To reach it...

At Paypal, they wanted to get the most valuable users first, which were the emigrants who wire money back home, but the transactions were infrequent - didn't work.

They needed a segment with a higher velocity of money - they found eBay 'PowerSellers' (the professional vendo...

All salesman are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.

Sales work best when hidden. People in sales, marketing, or advertising have a job title that has nothing to do with those things.

And there is a reason for all of this: none of us wants to be reminded when we're be...

The engineer's grail is a product great enough that it sells by itself. But anyone who says this either is delusional or is selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).

Think about distribution as something essential to the design of the product.

Good produc...

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. If every new user leads to more than one additional user, it will grow exponentially.

This ideal viral loop should be as quick and frictionless as possible.

In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or fails. They add value by becoming experts at a technical skill that can be evaluated relatively easily.

Sales are the opposite: a campaign could be to change surface appearances without changing the und...