Selling to businesses: sign of stars

Some days ago I watched David Heinemeier Hansson’s presentation on creating a profitable startup where he suggests that is generally more effective to sell to businesses than individual customers. That was kind of a useful observation that I, not being very experienced in running businesses, took for granted.

In several days I concerned myself with checking out latest article in Joel Spolsky’s column in the Inc.com magazine. It happened to be How Hard Could it Be: A Real Cool Customer. It was like one of those not rare alignment of stars that make certain idea pop-up again and again.

In his article Joel gives great arguments on why you’d better sell to businesses and not to consumers:

Businesses will happily spend large sums of money on fixed costs, because those costs can be spread out across so many of their customers.

Also Joel discusses this with Jeff Atwood in stackoverflow podcast #5, which I listened to yesterday.

This line of coincidences made me think a little about this idea. Being myself a part of a business I see that businesses pay easier not because they have lots of money (well, not only), but also because often for businesses it is easier to evaluate the value of certain costs.  Businesses can see how “costs can be spread out across so many of their customers” and what they would have in return. Individuals usually do not go that far to do such kind of analysis and therefore their decisions to buy tend to be based on momentary considerations.