The Future of Sales

My Team and I have very exciting countries Sales Kick Off Meetings during last two weeks! Some of my favorite people attended including all associates in the territory.

It was very interesting to see the country leaders looking for change and evolution even they are very successful now. All of them understood that Sales is changing.

Surely it’s no surprise that sales is changing. But how? The Future of Sales is all about customer value and team engagement.

In short sales teams are asked by customers to please stop selling. Customers are saying: inform me, engage me, ask me questions. Customers want to be helped, not sold. It’s about building value for customers, and this will have big consequences for the sales organization, methodology, skills, content and tools. And to do all the above, our sales teams need to be engaged as well.

In the near future much of sales will be self-service and transactional while the remaining sales jobs will take on a more consultative role. In an era where relationship is the new currency in sales, customers will only talk to people they trust. Executives will be asked to leverage their credibility to do exec-to-exec cold calling to open doors.

In many partner-based models such as consulting and law firms, it is already true that the most senior partners are responsible for bringing in (leads for) new business. Software will soon follow. Account managers are becoming customer success managers and inside sales prospecting will be done by marketing.

Historically we have optimized about getting the quote across the table. Now we need to optimize around building connections and creating value. Within the next years, we will see that changing very fast and Sales people will get hired and fired based on their social media skills. Why? just because Sales needs, and gets, the most sophisticated and ongoing training – it’s predicted that 90% of field sales activity to go virtual from research to preparation to creating interactive collateral

So, in my opinion three things are clear now:

The death of the old school

Old school sales techniques no longer work. Old sales (wolf of Wall Street, straight line selling) relied upon asymmetrical information between buyers and sellers. Sellers were more informed than buyers, strove to be industry experts, and shared their "secrets" with buyers about what they knew. In a world of information abundance, this doesn't work anymore. Oftenly buyers knows more than sellers about the options available.

Technology powered selling

Sales has adapted to this trend. We have seen the birth of inside sales as web demos and CRM systems reduced the advantages that outside sales reps had over the last 20 years. The latter can now compete with the former at a much lower cost. Tools that make reps faster at these tasks are important but they're really just riding the CRM wave and not powering any major shifts.

Sales segmentation 

Sales people use to be the same type. Sure there were senior salesmen and junior salesman but the job was essentially the same. We now have highly diversified sales people. Segmentation and segment specialization is becoming increasingly important in sales for all businesses and that's carry a new set of profiles in the teams.

Whether we like it or not things change daily around the world and the fastest that we adapt, the best chances to be successful soon. So, I'm very happy to see my team already working on the future!