Why would you need fewer sales people to sell this model than to sell Groupon? Restaurant and retail shop owners are not the easiest group to get ahold of, and they are suffering from pitch fatigue as everyone and their brother tries to sell them their daily deal service (that does have some theoretical differentiator).
For one, when your trying to disrupt something doing more of the same everyone is doing is probably not the right way to do it.
Service providers talk, they talk to their customers they talk to their competition - otherwise they provide a shitty service, which doesn't bring in much money, which gets you out of business.
Imagine this conversation:
Provider Alice: Hey I just got my first daily deal out the door. Hope it recuperates the steep cost in the long term.
Provider Bob: Cool, where did you do it?
Provider Alice: Groupon Clone X! Because...
Provider Bob: Nice, I do all my deals on Disruptive service Y, which costs me only a fraction of the Groupon Clone X.
Provider Alice: Motherfucker...
What I'm trying to say is that this market is a race to the bottom and will probably enter the schoolbooks as an example of a dead-end business opportunity.
I think the question boils down to this: Who will be the first to offer merchants a more favorable cut than 50/50? Or who will offer to let the merchants hold the cash? It's an inevitable race to zero for the coupon providers.
