Products that are Sold vs. Products that are Bought

Having been in the startup and consulting business for a while, I know that everything a company offers has a “sales cycle” — that is the amount of time it takes to go from interest in a product to actual receipt of payment or purchase order for that product. Some products have very short sales cycles of minutes (such as books on amazon.com or items on eBay) whereas others have very long sales cycles (especially large consulting projects sold to large companies that involve lots of decision-makers).

There have been tomes written about sales cycles and the such, so no point in going into that here. The real insight is that to achieve the sort of work/time balance proposed by the FHWW book, one needs to strive for a business in which products are bought vs. products that need to be sold.

What’s the difference?

A product that is bought requires that a company make its product easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to purchase. The emphasis is on marketing — increasing the awareness of a product, its value, and differentiating it from others in the market so as to facilitate the sale. But the sale is not facilitated by a person — it doesn’t take someone calling you up and convincing you of those merits to make the sale happen. Rather, users who are interested make the move to purchase the product. The customer is in control of the sales cycle and as such all a company can do is focus on marketing, order processing, support, and improving the quality of the product.

On the flipside, a product that needs to be sold is one that requires a person to communicate a products benefits. A sales person needs to find leads, qualify them, make the pitch, differentiate the product, prepare the proposal, and then shepherd this proposal through the close. For individual sales, the aspects of the proposal and close might be simplified, but the remainder is the same. Sales-oriented products require people involved, which means it requires time. Reducing the work week to 4 hours in these instances can have a significant, detrimental impact on revenue.

The punchline: go for Products that are Bought, not Services, or Products that need to be sold

The aspiring 4-hour-a-week entrepreneur or employee not only needs to shy away from services that require in-person delivery, but also products that require in-person sales (whether really in person or via phone). If you can’t make that transition, I can’t see how the reduced-hour workweek can be a reality unless you outsource the sales process itself. Even in the case where sales is outsourced, you’re just automating an inefficient task. You’re better served simply trying to change the way the product is offered. If you can find a way to make it so it’s bought rather than sold, you’re gold.

Quick note on blog test: this is my first attempted use of a trackback, and using the instructions at the Optiniche blog by Teli Adam, I think I’ve managed to make it work. Maybe.

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But how about businesses that require in-person delivery specifically by the person they are contracting with? For example, I have a hard time seeing how doctors or dentists can take advantage of four-hour work weeks. Maybe if they were simply office managers that had other doctors working for them, but if you were a doctor’s patient, would you want that outsourced? It certainly seems to be hard to apply the lessons learned in the book to those situations.

Service vs. Product

Basically it seems that the core challenge in applying the four-hour work week is that you have to be in a product business vs. a service business for this to make sense. A service business entails anything that is sold with the unit of work being delivered by a person rather than the unit of value delivered by a product. Furthermore, services have low repeatability. That is, if you deliver the service once and it takes a certain amount of effort, then delivering the service again will take a similar amount of effort.

On the contrary, with a product, the cost to build and develop the product is amortized across all the sales of that product. The cheaper it costs to build the product, the greater the revenue potential in sales. And if the product has no incremental cost once it’s built, then you can sell it literally millions of times without any additional cost (information products are a good example).

Now, this is something that Timothy Ferriss talks about in his book, so there’s no new ground discussed here. But the core is that most people are stuck in service businesses or in a service organization part of a product business. To change the work week requires either completely changing what you do for a living or structuring your work such that you no longer deliver the service, but either supervise others who deliver the service or productize the service offering such that there’s no longer an element of human delivery.

Buying People vs. Buying Brand

Another key issue is that is the value being bought from the company a function of the people who deliver that value (in which case, the cost of delivery is going to scale with the cost of labor), or is it a function of the brand (in which case, cheaper products and services can be offered at a premium given the value of the brand). To successfully become a four-hour work weeker, one needs to transition from becoming the sole delivery of a labor-driven value proposition to a manager of others who deliver the labor-driven value proposition to the sales of products that sell value based on brand, not on labor.

If you’re on the service side trying to live the four hour week, I see this as the fundamental challenge to face: either leaving the service business altogether, or productizing it in such a way that people buy the services at a premium based on your brand, and the labor is then outsourced to others who deliver at low cost.