You are a seller.

The odds are stacked against you. Your buyers have choice. The bigger your market, the more choice your buyers have. They must be drawn in, seduced and sold to. Or else their money is going elsewhere.

The fundamental premise of free markets is that money is the ultimate determinant. You want your customers’ money. So do a dozen other sellers. Or a hundred. Or even a thousand.

Your position is not the same as your buyers’. The buyers WILL find someone to buy from. You may never find someone to sell to. The buyers have the money, and others will show up to take it from them. Guaranteed. You, on the other hand aren’t guaranteed anything. You have a product or a service, but so do the other sellers.

Sellers are the free markets’ guinea pigs.

At the top of every consolidated marketplace and industry, you find one or two (maybe three) sellers who reign supreme, and then there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sellers who are scraping for leftovers.

Your customers only want to buy from the sellers who don’t have any dearth of other customers. Deep down, we all understand feel that wherever the most buyers are, the best quality may be expected. The best aftersales service may be expected. The most significant chance for innovation may exist.

Customers want to buy from popular sellers.

Sure there are the indie customers who “despise” big brands and “only buy from the small guy”, but let’s face it… that number is always way too small to bother with. And those sellers who foolishly do bother with it end up caught in another trap … where the buyers need not have any loyalty to them, but they must be loyal to their “small guy” status.

Whoever has the money has the upper hand. This goes hand-in-hand (heh) with the notion that customers want to buy from popular sellers. Popular sellers already have money. They are making nice offers and advertising them. And that’s it.

Sellers are the guinea pigs of free markets because at the top of every market are the sellers. They have all the abundance, prosperity and wealth. But dwelling at the bottom of each market are also sellers. Sellers without sales. Sellers who chase clients. Sellers who are forced to fight for each sale they get. Sellers without any customer loyalty.

By default, your customers will ignore you. By default, one (or three) of your competitors already reign supreme at the top. There isn’t much you can do. At least without reshaping everything significantly. Without shaking everything up significantly.

The day you decided to sell a product or service as a business owner… or as a sales person, or a marketing or advertising person… Or the day you decided to sell your time and your skills in order to get a job… you already had the short end of the stick.

Why?

Because someone else had money in their pockets. And you wanted that money to be transferred to yours.

So you had to sell. That is the fundamental premise of selling.

And then, by default, you were at the bottom of the barrel. You had the lower hand. Unless you knew what makes buyers tick. And unless you didn’t care about anything else.

Yours truly
Lakshay Behl