Incubate Consulting's Neil Brown shares his insight on what salespeople must do to survive.

‘Come with me if you want to live’ – The Terminator

There have always been salespeople and there always will be. Throughout history enterprising minds quickly learned how to utilise quick witted, memorable people to deliver some form of profit. Once it was gleaned from trading a piece of flint or perhaps a precious metal, but very soon it will be from delivering analytic solutions via machine learning integrations. Same suit, different tie.

However, the sales process is rapidly changing to match the modern buyer’s needs. The days of the traditional transactional salesperson, rep or order taker are numbered. If this is you, consider this playful analogy; You’re Arnie, a T-800 Terminator superseded by the shiny new T-1000 reboot, and to further rub salt into your circuit boards there’s an ultra-cool T-3000 kicking around. Your profile? For years, you’ve successfully sold simple products or solutions to end users who pretty much knew what they needed and why, you’re no subject matter expert and never needed to be. If you’re brave enough, you’ll probably admit that many of your successful outcomes were probably determined by price. What does the future hold for you? Well, unlike the golden T-800 strapline; you ‘won’t be back’

Let’s forget Skynet for a minute and think Internet. The digital world has given end users much more power via greater insight and access to extensive lists of potential suppliers’ right across the globe. In short, there’s no real need to deal with or meet talking catalogues anymore. It’s widely reported that B2B customers are now on average 57% through the buying cycle before they engage with a potential supplier. And to further confuse the issue the average buying group contains more than 5.4 people. That’s a lot of minds ‘almost made up’ on what they understand they want to buy and why before they engage a salesperson. Worse still, according to recent Forrester research, of the c4.5million B2B salespeople in existence today, it’s estimated one million sales jobs will be obsolete by 2020.

So who’s at risk come Judgement Day? Well, it’s highly likely to be the ‘order takers’. Order takers are basically salespeople who simply respond and supply to existing known end users and the salespeople who are most at risk of being displaced by web-based sales platforms. If not already, you really need to start thinking ‘integrated solutions’ rather than cool or useful products and establishing more personal and intimate relationships with end users forged by accumulating relevant data and valuable customer insight.

And who survives the fallout? Well, I’d bet large it’s the ‘order creators’, or solution sales consultants to you and me. These are the expert subject matter sales people that can identify or recognise the need and future opportunity. There’s no algorithm to equal just yet. They are emotionally intelligent, skilled relationship builders that unearth potential partnerships, understand complex buyer dynamics and intrinsically know how to articulate the value of investing in a complex product or service solution.

As John Connor considered: “The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

Incubate Consulting are experts in recruiting Sales, Marketing & Digital professionals in Scotland. If you would like to discuss solution sales professionals or 1980’s Sci-Fi with Neil, please comment below, or for a more discreet conversation call directly on 07917 458 066.