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    Are we really looking at a 75% reduction in sales heads by 2020?

    Bob Apollo
    Post by Bob Apollo
    February 29, 2012

    Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of Selling Power - in a characteristically provocative piece - recently predicted that the number of sales people in the United States could decline from the current 18 million to around 4 million by 2020. He quoted a Gartner report that projected that 85% of the interactions between businesses will be automated without any need for human interaction by that time.

    photo gerhard gschwandtnerNow, whether or you agree with the absolute size of the change to the future salesforce, there’s no doubt that the B2B sales process is already undergoing a pretty dramatic transformation, driven by a combination of changes in buyer behaviour and a relentless focus on improving the pre- and post-sales customer experience by some of the smartest sales organisations around.

    The changing face of B2B buying behaviour

    We’ve all become familiar with how the internet has made it far easier - even in high-value complex sales environments - for B2B buyers to research their subject and gather information without having to engage with a sales person until far later in their decision making process. These better-informed buyers have higher expectations of the sales people they eventually engage with, and are expecting them to clearly deliver value beyond that which can be found online.

    In these high-value complex sales environments, today’s direct B2B sales people need to be problem solvers that can help to make sense of all the information that is available to the prospect, capable of bringing a fresh perspective and new insights to the buying process. Transactionally oriented sales people will be increasingly irrelevant and ineffective in these situations. The qualities exemplified in The Challenger Sale will become even more important in the future than they are today.

    Improving the pre- and post-sales customer experience

    Today’s best SaaS vendors - who represent some of the smartest sales organisations around - have recognised that the pre- and post-sales customer experience is influenced through every touch-point between the prospect and the vendor. This includes making even powerful and sophisticated product offerings easy to understand, easy to try, easy to buy, easy to use, and easy to upgrade, expand and enhance.

    They have worked out how to intelligently blend web-based assets with a balance of inside and outside sales resources into a seamless customer experience that facilitates the buying process, rather than relentlessly (and boorishly) driving a traditional hard-selling process. In fact, I’ve concluded that the Cloud is a mind-set, rather than a technology.

    In contrast, many established software vendors are still wrapping a traditional direct sales process around their new SaaS-based offerings - and this unhealthy blend typically makes for a painful customer experience together with an unmanageably high cost-of-sale - not a great combination from any perspective.

    Redesigning the B2B sales process for the new realities

    It’s clear that transactional B2B selling is going increasingly on-line, supported by telephone-based advisers and an easy to navigate approach to self-serving the information the buyer needs. Economics dictate that face-to-face selling is going to be increasingly unaffordable in such environments.

    In higher-value complex B2B sales environments we can already see a move towards an intelligently blended sales model that combines easily accessible self-service on-demand information to support the buying decision process with a mixture of telephone-based and face-to-face sales assets.

    The idea of “one view of the customer” (including their social media activity) becomes critically important in such environments, and we’re already seeing significant progress amongst today’s smartest sales organisations in pulling these threads together. Many are already redefining what they expect from customer-facing sales roles.

    Conclusion

    I’m not sure that I buy into Gerhard’s projection (frankly, I struggle to project that far ahead in such a rapidly-changing world), but it’s clear to me that the future world of B2B selling is likely to be characterised by fewer, smarter face-to-face sales people backed by a well integrated systems to support the buying decision process.

    Sales organisations that get ahead of this curve will thrive. Those who remain in denial will in all likelihood wither away. Where does your sales organisation fit into this continuum - and how do you plan to adapt to the changing world?

    Bob Apollo
    Post by Bob Apollo
    February 29, 2012
    Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and Top Sales World Magazine, and the driving force behind Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading proponents of outcome-centric selling. Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob now works as a strategic advisor, mentor, trainer and coach to ambitious B2B sales organisations - teaching them how to differentiate themselves through their provably superior approach to achieving their customer's desired outcomes.

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