With information on their fingertips, your average consumer is always almost sold by the time they step into your store or visit your e-commerce website/app. So how can you build a sustainable business? By being extra sales-y? Nope.

So there will be changes in the way you sell. If you are a business owner & you are thinking short term trying to win a buck without creating that intrinsic value in your brand then you are going to see some dark days.

Why?

Because Subscription economy. Sounds like one of those things you’d call in sick and go to the movies instead of wasting another minute of your day trying to learn. But this is going to make you more money in the long term and it is more sustainable. Why? because in the subscription world, everybody wins & people like winning.

Let us go back in time a little. Remember until the 90s if you wanted to listen to one song, you’d have walk down to that store, wait for the album to release, stocked in inventory hoping it hasn’t sold out and purchase that whole album for $18-$20. A few years after, Apple.inc launched the “itunes” and you could now purchase just that 1 song for 99 cents. Not the entire album. Now with Spotify & Pandora, you don’t purchase songs anymore. You lease them. Storage, transmission, delivery everything is taken care of. All you need is a “SUBSCRIPTION”.

The good part about this model is the way it completely changed delivery. Upfront costs have been eliminated. Access has be democratised. This has made consumers powerful than they ever were before. They don’t need to pay high upfront fees to have access to products or services & bascially get things rolling. A small business owner now has access to the same grade of technology of that of a multinational corporation. A true new world order.

Now, pivoting a little, When you are out there trying to purchase any software from 2020 and onwards, make sure you ask them if they have a “pay-as-you-go” payment model. Never pay thousands of dollars to a vendor just because that is how it used to be a decade ago.

Remember, the power is yours!

Today, if you are looking for a vendor providing a product or a service, you need to pick those who are confident enough to charge you a minimum fee to start off and knows you’ll renew their monthly subscription after that first month because they are providing you an exceptional ‘post-sales’ experience.

Software robustness, post sales customer support, dedicated implementation specialists are going to be a part of the “post-sales” offering of only those vendors who truly care about their revenue and making their customer successful because they know both of those go hand in hand. As a customer, its that simple thumb rule to pick a vendor

Best!