Selling to merchants instead of marketing directors

For three years I sold influencer campaigns to marketing directors at brands. Now I sell a Shopify app to merchants. Both are ecommerce, both are a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month, and they are almost nothing alike as sales problems.

The variable is whose money it is.

The marketing director#

Spending a budget that was allocated to them. Their downside is not financial, it's reputational — a campaign that fails is a story they have to tell in a meeting. Their upside is a result they can present.

That produces a specific set of behaviors, none of which are irrational once you see the incentive:

They need the decision to be defensible more than they need it to be right. A predictable mediocre outcome from a recognized vendor beats a volatile good one from an unknown, because the second one has a version where they look foolish and the first one doesn't.

Case studies do enormous work. Not because they're evidence — everyone knows case studies are selected — but because they're transferable. It's something to forward to a boss.

The cycle is long and most of it is invisible. The real sale happens in internal conversations you're not part of, and you lose most of them without ever knowing they occurred.

Price is barely an objection. Getting the line item approved is the objection. Whether it's $4,000 or $6,000 rarely decides anything.

The merchant#

It's their money. Often their own store, sometimes their whole livelihood. There's no boss and no meeting.

They decide fast or never. A merchant can install an app in the time it takes to read the listing. Nobody has to approve it. The corollary is that if they don't decide now, they close the tab and are gone forever, and there is no nurture sequence that recovers most of them.

Price is the objection, and it's visceral. The difference between $49 and $99 a month matters in a way it never did with a marketing director, because it's coming out of the same account as everything else in their life.

They don't want to read a case study, they want to see it work on their store. Abstract proof is worth much less than a trial with their own data in it. Their skepticism is specific: they believe it worked for someone, they doubt it works for them.

They churn the second it stops obviously paying for itself. No sunk-cost politics, no contract to run out. Uninstall is one click and there's no relationship to preserve.

What this changed about how we build#

The whole product has to demonstrate value to a person who is watching closely and will leave immediately. That's a harsher environment than selling to a budget, and it's a much better one to build in.

You can't coast on a signed contract. You can't sell a result you don't deliver, because they'll see the actual number on their own dashboard within thirty days. Every month is a re-purchase decision.

I spent three years selling to people who could be persuaded and I got good at persuading them. The skill that matters here is different and less flattering: making the thing work well enough that it doesn't need to be argued for.

The one I miss#

Marketing directors will take a meeting. Merchants won't. Nobody running a store wants a call, and the entire relationship happens through a listing, a trial, and a support ticket.

That's more efficient and it costs you the thing I found most useful about the last company — sitting across from the customer and hearing them describe their problem in their own words. I've had to replace it with reading support tickets and watching what people do, which is more honest data and much less texture.

I'd take this side of the trade every time. I just want to note that something was given up for it.