Sales Is Dead: Long Live Sales

Sales: What is it Good For?

Recently, the excellent Bernard Marr asked the question Sales People: Do We No Longer Need Them?

Marr, drawing from his own experiences, highlights how little buyers actually need from car showroom sales people, how B2B businesses are replacing 'sales' in job titles with terms such as 'relationship management' and the automation of sales clerks (not a term we use in the UK) with automated check-outs.

This is all well observed stuff and is, in the most part, similar to my own experience working with large B2B enterprise sales teams. For example, the Financial Services industry is quite rightly going through profound change. Those that sell in this business have not had sales in their job title for some time and the regulators are ensuring that they will never be incentivised through sales commissions again.

The impetus for the change though is not just regulation, it is a new kind of buyer, the Connected Business Buyer

Sellers By Any Other Name

Of course, sellers that do not really sell is nothing new. The pharmaceutical market has been run in this way for years. Sellers create awareness and educate in a role that is part marketing and part sales. To many quota carrying professional sellers this probably looks like an easy ride, no one is promising a set of steak knives as first prize and unemployment as second. In reality though, their days are long, they have customers to serve and they are being asked to do more with less like any other seller whatever the job title - easy is what someone else’s job looks like until you have to do it.

The Connected Business Buyer

The impetus for the change though is not just regulation. It is a new kind of buyer, the Connected Business Buyer. The connected buyer is equally if not better informed than the seller and connect with their peers to get the inside track on what products, services and companies are really like to work with. They find three times more information for themselves (according to Forrester) than they receive through sales and marketing channels and most (75% or more according to IDC) use social networks in their decision making process. The connected buyer is a formidable character.

This is something of a paradox. Buyers are doing more for themselves but there is no less selling required

The Connected Buyer does not though, in my view, mean the end of Sales. Far from it. In fact, according to US Labour statistics 1 in 9 US workers is in Sales. It is around 1 in 10 in the UK and at similar levels for Europe. According to the ONS, Sales Leadership is still highly valued commanding one of the highest salaries in a typical organisation.

The Buyer-Seller Paradox

This is something of a paradox. Buyers are doing more for themselves but there is no less selling required. The reason is that the connected buyer demands more of sales. They expect sellers to provide deeper expertise when products or services are complex and they expect sellers to be far better informed about them. The needs of connected buyers are transparent to those sellers that are actively engaging in online, digital and social channels. Buyers are doing their research about their sellers so they expect the same or more in return.

Like Marr, I see evidence of change in sales professionals each and every day. Where it can be automated, for say simpler products, then it will be. To paraphrase Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz in their book Selling is Dead 'for those that sell commodities and don't offer any other value, then buyers will need them less and less and eventually not at all'.

When the interaction is concluded, will the world be a better place than when you began?

Sales as a Service

Sales though, has a place. At it's best, sales has much in common with leadership. Where there is change, there will be a seller. Sales has continued to reinvent itself from the pre-war travelling showman to consultative and solution selling today. The next evolution, in my view, is the Social Seller, an authentic and open guide through complex buying decisions. Daniel Pink in his book To Sell is Human, describes the role of sellers in the connected economy as sales in service. The test that Pink applies is this: If the person you are selling to agrees to buy, will their life improve? When the interaction is concluded, will the world be a better place than when you began? If it isn't then your particular brand of sales is dead. If it is then welcome to the new world of sales. Sales in service. Long may it live.

About: Dale Roberts is VP Professional Services for Social CRM Innovator Artesian, author Decision Sourcing, Gower 2013 and a regular speaker on the impact of Digital, Mobile and Social on organisations. He is currently helping large enterprise B2B sales teams improve the way they engage with their customers and completing his new book The World of Workcraft.