I am not anti-sales. I am not even anti-direct sales or B2B prospecting. Businesses have money. They have budgets allocated to solving problems, and if your solution is genuinely worth it — or even plausible enough — they will buy. That is not the issue.
The issue is that almost everyone in B2B has the wrong mental model for what the actual problem is. They think it is a product problem. Or a pitch problem. Or a sales resistance problem. It is none of those things, not really. It is a unit economics problem. And until you see it that way, you are optimizing the wrong thing.
Why people resist being sold to
Yes, there is natural resistance to sales. But it is worth being precise about what kind of resistance it actually is. It is not really a resistance to being sold to. It is a resistance to being disrupted. Someone calls you out of the blue while you are mid-thought, you pick up, and now you are in an unsolicited conversation you did not agree to. That alone is enough to put you in a defensive posture, even if what they are selling is something you actually need.
Add on top of that the reality that a fraction of a fraction of salespeople can actually sell without being annoying — not even pushy, just annoying — and you have a sport that requires constant refinement to play well. It is not intuitive. It does not feel like normal conversation. And most people doing it have not put in the reps to make it feel natural.
This is why attraction-based models are more potent long-term. Not because sales does not work, but because when someone comes to you already interested, you have skipped the disruption entirely. The resistance never builds. The conversation starts from a different place.
Product market fit is overrated
Here is a thing people say a lot that I think is mostly wrong: product market fit. The way it gets eulogized, you would think it is the whole game. It is not. Product market fit is really just a measure of LTV. It answers the question: once you have someone, how long will they stay, and was it worth what it cost to get them? That is an important question. But it is the second question, not the first.
The first question is whether you can get someone in at all. And that is purely a sales and go-to-market problem. Take a market of 20,000 potential clients. Assume you can reach them twice a year. Assume it takes conversations with 100 people to close one deal. How many deals can you do before you exhaust the market? That is a math problem. It is a unit economics problem. It has nothing to do with whether the product is good.
Sales is not a product market fit problem. It is a unit economics problem, a GTM problem, a conversion numbers problem. Not more than that.
The three archetypes of B2B businesses
When you think clearly about LTV to CAC — not the watered-down version, the real version — you start to see that B2B businesses only come in a few shapes. The entrepreneurs who truly understand the relationship between those two numbers are the ones who actually build businesses that make money. Everything else is noise.
The first archetype is the high-ticket, few-client model. They charge a lot, they need very few yeses, and even if a client leaves quickly the acquisition cost is covered. These businesses are rare, highly specialized, and deliberately small. They do not have large sales forces. They do not need them.
The second is the revenue-share or stage-gated model. Uber Eats is the clearest example — so well executed that most people do not even register it as B2B. The client pays little or nothing up front. The platform takes a cut of what gets created. The LTV is high because there is no real reason to leave. The churn, when it happens, is slow. Travis Kalanick built that business around this exact logic: align the cost of acquisition with the mechanism of value creation, and retention takes care of itself.
The third is the displacement model. You come in and dislodge an incumbent because you have something genuinely better. The client paid a lot to be with the old vendor, so switching to you is a considered decision — which means when they do switch, they tend to stay. High upfront cost to acquire, but high LTV to match.
Where Om Coda sits
I did not start by looking at Om Coda and retrofitting these frameworks onto it. These frameworks are just true, and it turns out we built to them anyway. We have a stage-gated model. We do not charge on the potential or the outcome — we charge on the steps between here and success. That keeps us accountable and keeps the client moving. We are locked into their result in the most literal sense.
That is the B2B model that works long-term. Not the one built around volume prospecting and hoping the numbers shake out. The one built around knowing exactly what your acquisition cost is, exactly what your delivery cost is, and engineering a relationship where the value created is always larger than both.