There’s a lot of sort of “inside baseball” stuff in the business of selling pool routes – things that you would only know about if you’re in the business. We’ve talked about quite a lot of it on this blog.
But there are also underlying philosophies that help us to connect our buyers and sellers, and we would like to talk a little bit about that.
Selling Goods, Services, and Access
Most people are most familiar with businesses that sell goods or products.
A retailer takes an item and sells it to a consumer. Businesses take items and sell them to other businesses as part of physical supply chains.
That’s pretty straightforward, but then you get into selling services.
A landscaping company sells a landscaping job. An infrastructure company sells a heavy project to a municipality. They have to lay out the scope, and timeline, and other kinds of “specs” that are not tied to anything physical that you can hold in your hand. The service is “delivered” when the service is done.
And then you get into selling access, which is a bit different.
The Nuts and Bolts of Selling Access
When you’re selling access, you’re working in a much less tangible and more abstract world.
What you’re selling is the value of information and relationships between business stakeholders.
That’s not to say that access isn’t valuable. In fact, we’ve seen our business explode based on how well our clients benefit from buying what we have to sell.
It’s a service, of a kind, but it’s very much about business valuation and figuring out what access to data and relationships is worth. In other words, what can the buyer get from maintaining a list of customers? What did the seller get by doing the same?
Then, of course, beyond raw value, you also have to deal with business preferences, relationships, and mutual benefit. It may be that companies work better together when they have the same philosophies. It may be that some company wants to see some transparency in the other company’s working model if they’re going to come to the table.
All of this is part of what we do as a gold-standard access provider for businesses. We do the connective work that leads to benefit for our buyers and sellers, and it’s largely where we work in the junction of information and relationships between people. For more, check out the website and take a look at how we help to add value in the pool business.
