I wouldn’t state it that unequivocally. But any high-dollar B2B operation relying entirely on remote sales either doesn’t need a sales team, or is begging for an aggressive competitor to take their lunch.
I think this is a generational thing. I do B2B consulting, remote only, and it's all about the relationship of trust. Building that over voice and video with a digital-native CEO is no problem at all.
I will add that my most recent client is remote-only and in their thirties. No competitor can beat me by going "on-site" because there is no site and never will be.
I’d wager it’s deeper than that. Economies of scale force proximity in subtle ways. Finance shouldn’t need to be concentrated, but for a host of reasons most of it is, and a start-up looking to sell to it benefits from proximity. Even crypto largely retread those old paths.
That said, there are business which do not benefit from this sort of scaling. They will be dispersed. If the supplier similarly doesn’t have scaling economies, something I’d argue most non-Fortune 500 consulting does not, then yes, remote-remote will win.
For what it’s worth, I work 90% remote. And I’m in a sales-type capacity. But the only people I work with almost entirely remotely are those who are themselves remote. And even then, in-person meetings usually add value.
I do buy into getting on a plane or having someone local. That generally speeds up and increases close rate + renewal. But if you nail distribution or PLG.. can run enterprise sales much more efficiently and without as big a hit, and reinvest that saved $ elsewhere. But that's a high bar. More reliable to take heavy VC $ and burn it on expensive field staff to paper over all the gaps and hope accounts don't churn too fast. Things change again as a market saturates, but for new categories, all this is pretty established in b2b..
During much of the Earth exploration phase destinations in Asia had more food and money than Europe (also easier to survive a winter)... I don't see this ever being the case with Mars.
It's cheaper to ship materials to Low Earth Orbit from Mars, than it is to ship those same materials from earth. Can you imagine our current space industry (worth billions of dollars) could be operated from Mars? If there was a settlement on Mars, they could do it for approximately 2/3 of the (fuel) cost of doing it from Earth.
Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)
This is provably incorrect