Conclusion

We’ve spent a great deal of time discussing viral concepts within the context of consumer-based (business-to-consumer or B2C) businesses. This focus on consumer-based companies, coupled with the concept of fan-out within the viral growth equation itself, may even lead one to believe that viral growth is only feasible within consumer-oriented businesses. The notion within fan-out of referring others to a product just seems, at least to the authors, to be something that people do with products they use in their everyday lives — not something businesses do between each other. Our experience as practitioners is that companies are ‘sold’ products by legions of sales people, who are in turn employed for their skills in persuading companies to buy products. Companies purchasing products typically implement processes to request proposals (‘RFPs’) from product-producing companies in order to more objectively evaluate feature sets, price points, and suitability of the competing products to fit their needs. The sales cycle for technology products is often a long and onerous one, taking from several weeks to over a year. Implementation of the products can take even longer, with multiple teams gearing up to identify how to modify the product to meet internal business needs. Careers can hang in the balance as multi-million dollar implementations of complex systems take months and even years to complete.