I was recently in Spain, and while I was there, I rented a car.
It was a little Fiat 500 and it looked like this:
This was all made very easy by the fact that despite being in a fairly small town (Cartagena), Avis had a store
In fact the Avis Budget group has more than 10,000 locations across 180 countries.
It's how they do $12b a year in revenue.
That's what I'd call distribution.
There's even a Silicon Valley truism on the topic:
So, how do you build distribution?
In B2B your sales team is your distribution channel
The frustrating thing about distribution is that it's not an asymmetric lever.
You're probably familiar with the concept of a 10x engineer.
Marketing can also be a 10x lever (or more). One piece of viral content can drive thousands of results.
Sales isn't really like that - it's a game of inches.
A great salesperson might come in and do 150% to plan, maybe even 200% to plan. But that makes them a 1.5x lever, or a 2x lever.
Not a 15x lever or a 20x lever.
This is simply how most things in life operate
Let's go back to the example at the start of the email - Avis.
The location I rented from wasn't a 10x location.
It's the opposite - one single location in Spain wouldn't be very useful.
Likewise, the value of a Starbucks or McDonalds location is their proximity to you, rather than the fact that the store itself is enormous.
This is the same reason Amazon Web Services have a sales team of more than 60,000 individuals (about half of the entire employee base at AWS).
It's why Salesforce spent $13.5b in 2023 on sales & marketing, but only $7.5b on operations and research (aka engineering).
Building your distribution infrastructure:
If you're thinking about growing your sales team, I've put together a document: Understanding sales roles, and the order you should hire them in.
If you'd like to talk about working together to find the people who are going to make your sales team grow, book time with me here.