The components of a business model, as described more fully in my book, Billion Dollar Company, include:
- the growth driver--what drives revenue (5 choices)
- the pricing model (15 choices)
- sales and distribution strategy
One of the more challenging things to do is to illustrate how distribution can provide comparative advantage in a business model. Fortunately a story in ReadWriteWeb provides a great example. Salesforce.com is widely known as an excellent SAAS-based CRM system, used to keep detailed information on customers and their contact history. CNS Response uses Salesforce to capture patient brain data, analyze it and report it to physicians. By using Salesforce as its IT infrastructure CNS is able to distribute the data to physicians 75% faster than with the previous manual process. Given that patient lives are involved, the improved distribution of the information is particularly noteworthy. Who would have thought of Salesforce.com as a way to improve distribution?
The previous example of business model thinking is here.
