‘In a high-dollar B-to-B business, building and scaling sales can’t be done remotely’
This is provably incorrect
This is provably incorrect
I will add that my most recent client is remote-only and in their thirties. No competitor can beat me by going "on-site" because there is no site and never will be.
I’d wager it’s deeper than that. Economies of scale force proximity in subtle ways. Finance shouldn’t need to be concentrated, but for a host of reasons most of it is, and a start-up looking to sell to it benefits from proximity. Even crypto largely retread those old paths.
That said, there are business which do not benefit from this sort of scaling. They will be dispersed. If the supplier similarly doesn’t have scaling economies, something I’d argue most non-Fortune 500 consulting does not, then yes, remote-remote will win.
For what it’s worth, I work 90% remote. And I’m in a sales-type capacity. But the only people I work with almost entirely remotely are those who are themselves remote. And even then, in-person meetings usually add value.
I do buy into getting on a plane or having someone local. That generally speeds up and increases close rate + renewal. But if you nail distribution or PLG.. can run enterprise sales much more efficiently and without as big a hit, and reinvest that saved $ elsewhere. But that's a high bar. More reliable to take heavy VC $ and burn it on expensive field staff to paper over all the gaps and hope accounts don't churn too fast. Things change again as a market saturates, but for new categories, all this is pretty established in b2b..