In 1999 Neil Rackham, one of the authors behind the sales bible, SPIN Selling, co-authored “Rethinking the Sales Force”, in which he posited that worldwide, the number of professional sales people would be reduced by 50% within 10 years. It’s been 11 years and whether that prediction has come to pass one thing is certain, being a sales rep today is even harder than it was then.
In 1899 if you wanted to buy something that wasn’t made locally, you probably had to learn about it, pay for it, and take delivery of it from a salesman. The advent of newspapers, then eventually radio and television allowed companies to use marketers to get their product messages to the masses without hiring “canvassers”. Eventually distribution centers, retail chains, and cheap interstate shipping negated the need for salespeople to carry goods as well.
In 2010, knowledge is at our fingertips, the most valuable of our purchases are virtual and shipped over the net, and many of our transactions are “demand driven” or automated. So what do you need a salesperson for?
That’s the question Rackham troubled over in 1999. Much of what Rackham has predicted has come to pass. Communicating product value to customers in many cases is not enough to justify the expense of a professional salesperson. Rackham’s key point was this: salespeople need to add value to the transaction. Among other ideas, the most obvious was that salespeople need to be industry experts and act as consultants to their customers, not just “talking brochures”.
Unfortunately, although the medium for knowledge transfer and personal brand building have come a long way, they’re still not ideally suited for the kind of just-in-time communication a salesperson should have with a potential client. Websites and marketing collateral are still much too static to be useful for timely interaction between salespeople and prospects. Not only are there technical barriers to entry, but in most organizations they’re technically owned by a totally different department: marketing.
What’s needed is a dynamic medium that can be updated, archived, and distributed by salespeople. Some place where salespeople can share knowledge that would add value to their customers, and where customers could interact with them in a non-threatening, non-committal way. Ideally, one could even build communities of interest around certain topics and share the material easily with partners and associates. Content could be original in part, but could also rely heavily on anecdotes and knowledge sources collected from around the web. It would be great if this knowledge, once published, could be attached to certain salespeople, bolstering their credentials as domain experts and building their value to potential clients. Ideally, this knowledgebase could also serve to attract non-customers to a company and set it apart as a thought leader in its space. If only something like that were available.
Ah well, maybe next year.
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