The Death of the Sales Force Part 5 – Will Selling Live On?

I promised to fill you in on the outcome of the business symposium where the “Death of the Sales Force” was discussed by a panel of business experts.  The panel included a Banker, an owner of a 40 year-old Insurance Agency, a Partner in a successful regional IT Consulting Firm, a partner in an Accounting Firm, a Turnaround Expert/Financial Consultant, a Manager of VOIP from Verizon, me and the five person management team from the company that began this all.

We began by commenting on the speaker who so impressed this management team with his prediction that all products and services will be bought, salespeople will no longer be needed, relationships were unimportant, and the only way to compete was to lower costs.

When all was said and done, we agreed that lowering costs was important, but all of the examples provided by the speaker were for products that had been commodities for years and most were always bought rather than sold. In effect, nothing was really new here. I created a document for this meeting that illustrates a wide array of products and services, and a comparison of which are transactional (bought) versus those which are either solution driven, complex or expensive (sold).

In the end, the sales force will live on forever, but it will require that your salespeople be stronger, better at selling value, much better at differentiating themselves from the competition, and even better at building relationships.

How capable are your salespeople in these areas?  Have your sales force evaluated and find out!