Revolutionizing Sales: Disruptive Tools for Modern Businesses

Sébastien Rouxel-An
nexteconomy
Published in
6 min readMar 23, 2023

In this series of articles, I present disruptive tools for your business. They are not just software or simple tricks; they are an upcoming revolution that will change what commercial products are and how they work.

These models are currently only used in a niche market (the Web3 ecosystem) but will become norms in the coming years.
Looking at all the concepts and companies, We can start to envision the potential for the traditional economy. It is bigger than you imagine.
This article is designed for anybody interested in business and technology, with or without prior knowledge of those topics.

This first article will show you the fundamental transition in how we build and commercialize products that is about to happen. I promise you will rethink how you sell and interact with customers.

Someone once told me, “Many people have ideas, but not many actually implement them.” This sentence stuck with me, and until 2 years ago, I wasn’t sure I could be one of the few doers, a successful artist, and an entrepreneur.
I often created artworks or products that were marketable but failed to sell at a large scale. Distribution is essential; without it, you have no impact, and you are not truly doing.
This changed because new tools allowed me to create art and items and distribute them easily worldwide.

Bridge the Physical and the Digital World

In the physical world, if you want to distribute a product, you need a supply chain.

Web 2, the regular web in which you are able to interact, chat, and buy things, also relies on those supply chains to distribute items.
You can purchase access to services; subscriptions.

Web 3, though, dematerialized the product. It “exists,” but not as a physical object:
Let’s say you buy a plane ticket. You won’t “own” the ticket; you could not transfer it to someone or resell it. But if the ticket were a digital asset, you would be able to.
This is an NFT (non-fungible token): you would own the actual ticket; it wouldn’t simply be your registration in the airline database. It wouldn’t need to be controlled by the airline.

Before, the traditional paper ticket was just a receipt and was not worth anything by itself; only you could use it. It is a personal registration to a service.
Now the NFT, this digital asset, is a coupon for this flight. In fact, you or anybody else can simply board the plane with it.

Of course, in this case, it has good and bad implications: you can get a “refund” easily, but it creates a secondary market with people reselling the ticket that could drive prices up. Maybe you would also need stronger control to board the plane, for example.

Smart Products

The airline ticket has to be designed to fit the needs. A digital asset could be acting exactly like a classic ticket (cannot be transferred, etc.), but it could also offer a huge amount of improvements.
Imagine: you don’t need to register your personal data because it could be linked to your identity in a safe manner; it could also allow you to purchase flight insurance from any 3rd party with a few clicks on your phone. It is a programmable ticket.

Insurance services of this kind have existed since 2017, with, for example, AXA, which sold smart insurance to automate payouts.

But since then technological standards and tools matured and they are now easy to incorporate into your product to instantly unlock fruitful utility.
They can also be used for projects of all sizes.

Dematerialized products

Those models are great for art, by default you can buy anything and keep the proof of purchase. You can certify the digital token comes from the original artist’s account.

But you can buy art stored in a safe in Switzerland, and not worry about logistics if you keep it there. You safely own it forever.
A certified product can take any shape or form, and the added value of digital assets is that it allows ownership of the product regardless. This is full ownership without a third party, and that creates a wide range of applications.

Applying all those properties is now possible. This will change the way we trade goods and services forever.

A new kind of supply chain

This programmable ticket creates a new layer in the supply chain.
After selling your items to your clients, they each become a de facto distributor.
The distribution rules are set and can be tailored to the product. But you are always sure that the buyer owns the product. The product is “liquid”: it can be sold and transferred and keep the same guarantees.

Example: a wholesale market for your distributors.

Your current distributors can purchase large quantities of your product and be able to manage their stock easily. They could:
-order from you if it is a physical product (you can set limits)
-resell their “virtual” stock in between them
-match orders from a physical shop or from their own online platform.

Those are things that could easily be implemented today with the current technology. You would need to create the web interface, but you don’t need advanced skills in Web3 technology to do it.

Underestimated Tools

Those are just a few of the properties and applications of digital assets.
In the past the main focus of those technologies was traceability. I believe we have underestimated the potential of the current tools. In recent years those tools have matured.
Today there is a decentralized market for products both material and virtual.

Example: Gamify merchandising and hack customer loyalty

Wolf Game is a game using digital assets. You play to earn digital collectibles and collect WOOL, a digital coin. In one of the mini game, people could collect assets, and those included “Merch”. Hoodies, socks, and beanies, that the player could win for free.
You can use this token to order the physical object. They have a classic shop on a website and you can use the collectible as a coupon and order the item.
This allows the game company to not have to care about the distribution, the orders go directly to the manufacturer which they selected.

The impact on customer loyalty is huge: Players have an emotional connection with the items, it is a collectible so if you have a strong brand image they can become truly sought after. People can buy or sell on the secondary market (the secondary markets already exist and your product will become tradable on those by default).

Any company could easily implement this kind of structure. You don’t necessarily have to deal with the logistics or the physical item, as shown in this example.
You can gamify online and local social events for example, with some participants winning a coupon for your services or your products.

This is a tool, you can use it to build things that were impossible before. It is time to be creative and generate value. It is a business opportunity.

Going further: we have to rethink the economy

In the flight ticket example, I mentioned that turning the classic ticket into a digital asset opened a secondary market.
This is a characteristic of any digital asset by default. It can be negative, we could imagine nefarious actors buying all the tickets and pushing the prices up, but it also creates a free market for any object designed this way.
Would it be more efficient to have travel agencies buying the tickets this way and competing to offer the best deal at the lowest initial cost for them?

This is almost like a new layer to the economy, it could affect the structure of the market. We will see in the coming years how this new conception of what products are will transform our economy.

In conclusion

Those models are not limited to the properties I presented, I focused on general concepts and how you can use those in business.
I believe they are deemed to change the market, and I hope this introduction helps you use this revolution as a catalyst for your projects.

In the upcoming articles, I will present some of the disruptive distribution mechanisms. We will also focus on how you can truly empower your customer thanks to new models and ideas.

There are already many successful projects and world-famous brands benefiting from this new economy, you should too.

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