"THE ONE REASON why B2B sales is so expensive to set up"
When I worked at Schindler, it was always mind-blowing to me how high their cost base was.
The main reason why sales is so expensive in B2B is because it relies on people, which includes paying salaries, offices, social insurance packages etc. But, people also make mistakes and these needed to be accounted for. They have to be managed, hired, retained and possibly retrenched. There is hence also an emotional cost.
It gets very expensive when you consider the cost of hiring a person and then getting into a situation where the salesperson does not return any value after 6 months and you do not know what went wrong in the process. Repeating this cycle numerous times adds to this cost.
So, following the lean startup approach, you want to initiate small review timeframes, where you test something and see the results for a few weeks and then reiterate if this is successful. You really shouldn't "try something out for 6 months". You need to see results almost immediately. Certainly, you can be committed for long periods of time, but the testing and reiterating process needs to be short.
