The most interesting aspect of the internet's impact on business from SiliconCloud's perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and subsequently the shape of every vendor's sales funnel. Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product/service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more.

Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key sales people who would feed them information from the top of their sales funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching on relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each vendor's site researching about their products, people and client base.  Relatively late in the prospect's decision cycle, it would engage the vendor's (sales) people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor's product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already much more "qualified".

The result of this shift in shopping patterns is that the internet has tended to make every marketplace more "efficient.". It used to be that the size of your firm's sales force was the key to finding the most new customers, but that is not necessarily always the case today. The good news for small businesses is that on the internet, no one can tell if you are a one person sole proprietorship or a 1000 person consultancy.

It turns out that most small businesses (and start-ups) have relatively niche-y products that they generally sell to companies in their rolodex and companies two degrees away from their rolodex. The internet disproportionately favours small businesses since it enables them to position their niche goods to people shopping for that particular niche good regardless of the numbers of degrees of separation from their rolodex.

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