Death of field sales
Why now is the time to shift to an inside-out approach to selling.
Most executives think of sales as an outside activity.
The truth is, field sales has been dying for years. It’s been ailing for so long that no one noticed its actual time of passing. Pretty much everyone knows it intuitively, at least). But no one’s prepared to acknowledge it. COVID has only amplified its inevitable demise.
Of course, I’m not heralding the end of field salespeople. There is a requirement for field salespeople in some (but definitely not all) markets now – and there will always be circumstances where face-toface selling is indispensable.
What are on their way to extinction are environments where sales is essentially an outside activity. Even in engineer-to order environments today, only a tiny percentage of the total volume of activities required to originate and prosecute a sales opportunity are performed in the field. And those important field activities would simply not occur if it were not for the volume of work performed inside.
The fact is, sales today is an inside endeavor, supported, in some cases, with discrete field activities.
If you want proof, follow one of your field salespeople around for a week. What you’re likely to discover is that your field salesperson spends less than 10% of their time in the field. The balance of their time will be spent in an office of some kind (your head office, a branch office, a home office or a makeshift office in the backseat of a rental car!).
If my prediction is correct, your field salesperson is not really a field salesperson at all. They are an inside salesperson who performs occasional field activities.
An Inside-out approach to sales
It turns out that customers want to communicate online and by phone to the maximum possible extent. Even where major deals are concerned, video conferences are almost always a better alternative than face-to-face visits. (Of course, a critical few activities do still need to occur in the field: and that’s fine.)
It only makes sense to embrace the kind of sales function that will support your (and most likely, your clients’) preferred approach to purchasing.
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What’s required for most organizations is an inside-out approach to sales. In practice this means embracing two new starting assumptions.
The first point means acknowledging that inside salespeople are NOT secondclass citizens relative to field salespeople. Rather, they are the organization’s sales frontline and, accordingly, field sales resources should only ever be added to the extent that they are required to support the efforts of your inside salespeople.
The second point means embracing the idea that sales is a team (rather than an individual) endeavor. You only have to look at the factory floor to see why this idea makes perfect sense.
Centralized scheduling and division of labor is the central tenant of any modern manufacturing plant. It’s what provided manufacturing with its staggering improvements in both productivity and quality over the last 150 years.
For sales this means stripping marketing, customer service and field activities away from salespeople and allocating them to other specialists, effectively freeing up your sales resources to do what they are actually paid to do—sell!
Interestingly, an inevitable consequence of this new direction is the elimination of commissions—just as piece-rate pay was a casualty of division of labor in production environments!
Salespeople are still needed. Not just they way they once were.
The death of field sales does not mark the end of field salespeople. They still exist, and they always will. What it does mark is the beginning of a new era, where sales is essentially an inside function.
You’ll come to discover that the inside-out sales model results in happier customers, a lower average cost of sale, and a faster growing business. It’s time to be done with the grieving so we can knuckle down and exploit this exciting new reality.