DistroFitSales
A human closing deals. Only works when the deal pays for the human.
What it is
Direct selling, one of the 19 traction channels. S3 Thiel’s spectrum runs from complex sales through personal sales, then a dead zone, then advertising, then viral. His summary of the failure mode is that poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. S2
When it works
When annual contract value justifies a person. Janz’s tiers: a thousand customers at a hundred thousand dollars each needs enterprise field sales, ten thousand at ten thousand needs an inside sales force, and below that you need inbound or virality instead. S5 Benchmarkit’s 2025 data shows CAC payback highly correlated to ACV, with deals over $250k materially cheaper to pay back than deals in the $50k to $100k range. S20
What it needs from the product
A price high enough that a salesperson’s time is covered, and a salesperson. One person cannot run outbound and build the product.
How it decays
Warm outbound was in use at 48% of B2B companies as of October 2025, and intent-based outbound was the most planned experiment at 49%. S24 Crowded, but still the primary motion for high-ACV products.
What the report checks
The capacity gate needs a small team. The arithmetic gate needs your annual price to clear an assumed floor for human selling, which is an assumption and is labelled as one.
Sources
- S3 Growth Method, "19 traction channels for growth marketers" secondary source
- S2 FourWeekMBA summary of Zero to One, ch. 11 (Thiel) secondary source
- S5 Christoph Janz, "Five ways to build a $100 million business"
- S20 Benchmarkit, "2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics"
- S24 Kyle Poyar, "The B2B GTM Playbook for 2026", Growth Unhinged