I recall a certain leading institutional research firm pontificating on the ultimate death of the institutional salesman because of technology. Now we are in the world of social media, google, and now sales 2.0… and many believe that the old-fashioned sales model is dead. Not me! Institutional salespeople are still around and technology will never replace people completely in the sales process.
Don’t get me wrong. I am an adopter of technology and want to leverage it as much as possible to become more efficient but, trust me, traditional sales will never die and the further we try to substitute technology for building relationships and bypassing direct contact, the more difficult it will be to sell. This is especially true for services that are not commodities.
Here is a simple example of my belief in action. We took a trip to New York yesterday to call on some prospects where we were stuck in the sales process. The meetings all went well and I don’t think it was a coincidence. When you are sitting in front of someone and have their full attention (as opposed to some statistic in your CRM or web analytic tool), you can gauge interest, see body language, etc…the interaction is much more effective and the conversation flows naturally and all good things happen…This of course assumes you are skilled at in person meetings and that’s a topic for another blog.
Old fashioned sales is here to stay. It’s more expensive to sell this way so you have to be judicious with your travel but there will never be a substitute for an in person meeting to advance the sales process.
Brick
Complex products will always need salespeople.
A lot of the Sales 2.0 stuff is gibberish. Social media and CRM will never sell enterprise software or even expensive, low-tech industrial machinery. Sales 2.0 tools and technology can make prospecting easier, but have nothing/little to do with actually putting the business in the bag.
Here’s another piece of bunk: Sales 2.0 will eliminate the need to ever call a prospect. Just deploy the technology and wait for the $200,000 order to come in. What a crock.
Amen. Thanks for the support on this, but maybe that’s because you’re old like me 🙂
Well……the old part you have correct, but we do use 2.0 tools: webinars, YouTube, social media, the whole gamet.
The stuff helps, and it still takes somebody to bag the groceries.
agreed.
being a good salesperson is the ultimate job security as it cannot be replaced by a machine or sent to mumbai. a lot of sales trainers have talked about strategies to never cold call again but it’s garbage – cold calling, setting appointments, and solving customer’s problems is the only way a sale is made – full stop
agreed, keep building relationships and remain a problem solving resource.