Guest post from Selling Power Magazine by Gerhard Gschwandtner
Note: When Selling Power Magazine came out 15 years ago or so they were way out of the box. They are still innovative and I think this article is worth thinking about if you’re running a sales department.
I’m not sure whether I agree with the numbers: from 18 million salespeople to 4 million in less than 7 years. However I think you’ve got to be hiring better salespeople who are innovative and entrepreneurial or you and your department become dinosaurs …
At our last Sales 2.0 conference, I asked the audience members to raise their hands if they had ever purchased anything on Amazon.com. All hands went up. Then I asked, “How many of you have ever spoken to an Amazon.com salesperson?” Nobody! Amazon.com’s technology architecture has eliminated the need for salespeople. According to the Census Bureau, the amount of sales closed over the Internet through such e-commerce sites as Amazon exceeded $165.4 billion in 2010. According to Forrester Research, that number will grow to $250 billion in 2014.
As computing power accelerates, online interaction will become more customer friendly, and B2C online sales models will be adopted by B2B companies. Some software companies have already begun to sell their applications online. After the online sale, customer service representatives will stand by to help answer questions.
Technology is clearly transforming the profession of selling. IBM is currently working on the DeepQA project, which will allow question-answering technology to consistently outstrip the best human performance. IBM’s team has demonstrated that its processing computer called “Watson” can understand natural language and deliver a single and precise answer to a question asked on Jeopardy! IBM found that the average response time on the game show is 3.5 seconds. IBM’s team created a computer that allowed Watson to deliver the right response faster than the average contestant.
At the core of the transformation process is not the software application used, but the computing power that drives the application. For example, in 1992, many computers ran on the 66-MHz Intel chip 486DX. The speed of this chip was 54 MIPS (million instructions per second). Today’s Intel chip Core i7-990X Extreme Edition runs at 3.46 GHz, and it can perform 159,000 MIPS.
As the number of software applications is exploding and computing power is accelerating, we will see more sales tasks move online, requiring fewer salespeople.Gartner, a research organization, predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of interactions between businesses will be executed without human intervention. It is likely that of the 18 million salespeople in the United States, there will be only about 4 million left.
If today Watson can respond to complex questions in natural language with pinpoint accuracy and in fewer than three seconds, it is likely that 10 years from now, a Watson-like online sales avatar will answer all the questions customers need to ask in order to make a final purchasing decision. I see a clear trend: Outside sales will continue to shrink throughout this decade. Inside sales will grow at a 15 percent rate per year. Sales-support staff will increase over the next decade. New job titles such as chief listening officer, sales transformation manager, sales operations manager, and sales analyst will expand. If you want to stay in sales for the next decade, my advice is to become more efficient, more motivated, more solutions oriented, and more customer focused. The bottom line: If we don’t find and fill a need faster than a computer, we won’t be needed.
I would say this is probably true but not for the reasons stated in this article.
I think it’s probably true because people don’t like or trust sales people.
Sales people only want to do one thing: close the sale. They want the money. They are hunters.
That makes them adversarial in the relationship.
Now, a person might prefer to work with a computer because they have no motivation. They are simply answer-givers.
But the real sales people are going to be the public. As user-generated reviews move to the b2b space more people will gravitate to them. As they do on Amazon. Previous customers sell product on Amazon, not a computer.
So, I think that’s the real danger for sales people. How can you be more helpful, more honest than the person who actually bought the product and has no incentive to say anything other than the truth?
Sage
Thanks. So you think that the reason Google buys a company and fires all the salespeople is because people don’t like most salespeople? But if we were better at what we do, Google wouldn’t fire everybody?
OK, its a theory.
I’ll give you this: I just got a killer sales call from a guy selling virtual trade shows. I had clicked on something because it was mildly interesting and promptly forgot about it. Andy, the sales guy, was so engaging when he followed up that I allowed him to interrupt me and have a dialogue. The result was I agreed to attend the Webinar.
Whether I ultimately become buyer or a referral source is not the point. Maybe nothing will come of it, but Andy did his job well. So you’re right, a good salesperson is invaluable.
In my view the premise of the article still stands, that there are going to be a lot less people going forward who call themselves “salespeople.” And maybe, to your point that’s a good thing.
By the way, Sage, we’ve got a new version of our profiles coming out — and you still have some unused from when you bought them in 2007
Alan