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In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone. Suppose you create a software service that helps convenience store owners track their inventory and manage ordering. For a product priced around $1,000, there might be no good distribution channel to reach the small businesses that might buy it. Even if you have a clear value proposition, how do you get people to hear it? Advertising would either be too broad (there\u2019s no TV channel that only convenience store owners watch) or too inefficient (on its own, an ad in Convenience Store News probably won\u2019t convince any owner to part with $1,000 a year). The product needs a personal sales effort, but at that price point, you simply don\u2019t have the resources to send an actual person to talk to every prospective customer. This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don\u2019t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It\u2019s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don\u2019t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n