Menu
Enough already.
Recently, an infographic was published on LinkedIn that purports to prove why one million B2B sales jobs will be lost in the next five years, perhaps signaling the (alleged) death of the B2B salesperson.
But, before I tackle that infographic, a couple of quick notes so the more zealous reader won’t make several incorrect assumptions:
1. I do wholeheartedly believe that social media and other digital tools are enormously valuable in the marketing and sales environment. Formulating a b2b growth marketing strategy requires a marketer to look at all of the available tools and take advantage of the most beneficial ones for the specific niche at hand.
2. Yes, things are changing in selling. But, they are always changing. Voice mail changed things. Computers changed things. Cell phones changed things. PowerPoint changed things. The cloud is changing things. Video is changing things. Social and digital are definitely changing things.
3. Tools are tools. They do nothing without someone to implement them. They don’t replace everything, and they typically create the need for many other things. Robots made companies far more cost efficient, but they did not eliminate the need for direct labor.
4. Solutions with multiple dependent and independent variables dictate enormous complexity in the decision-making process that can affect the brand image. Businesses often take the help of reputation management services to keep up the brand value. This requires input, analysis, evaluation, and comparison, often from multiple individuals and/or departments. It is extraordinarily rare for a company to make these decisions without the knowledge and expertise of professional salespeople.
5. Transactional selling can definitely be simplified by social selling tools, but account management cannot be replaced by those tools. Someone is often still required to deliver, service, maintain, update, and provide training for product/service solutions.
To further muddy the waters, some of what this discussion entails is semantic in nature.
What is a salesperson exactly? What does he or she do in the B2B environment? Is this debate about inside sales, outside sales, sales engineers, account managers, or other similar roles and positions?
The basic premise of the idea that 1 million salespeople stand to lose their jobs because social is replacing them is this: If people know more, they can make decisions without help from some pesky, aggressive, obnoxious salesperson (Thank God!)
But, while no one that I know of denies the power and usefulness of social media in the B2B landscape, to assert that social (and the Internet) will precipitate the loss of 1 million jobs in the next five years could be an overstatement. Yes, the recent trends in the B2B ecommerce world world do focus on the digital platforms, however, the competition at hand is not simple.
Here is why: Complexity. Competition. Information Overload.
In an increasingly complex environment, with multiple competitors providing widely varying solutions to a single problem – and with all of that information available at one’s fingertips – the decision-making process doesn’t get easier, it gets WAY harder.
Are there customers who can make decisions without salespeople? Of course.
Does the proliferation of information help them in that process? Absolutely.
Have those types of customers always existed?
YES.
So, enough already. If “social selling” eliminates 1,000,000 B2B “sales” jobs, they probably weren’t sales jobs to begin with.
And here is what I can absolutely, unequivocally guarantee those of you who propagate this idea – most companies want their competitors to believe you.
It will make their lives much easier.
Really? Why am I (along with others) getting so many cold calls?
How many “social sellers” are using social tools to make the “cold” (disruptive) calls that used to be made in-person or by telephone?
The tools change. Methods evolve. But companies will always NEED to be disruptive in order to get noticed. Clearly, the “cold call” doesn’t need to be as cold as it used to be because social tools also provide enormous information advantages for the salesperson.
But, let me suggest that if your company thinks prospecting and cold-calling are dead, I want to compete against you.
The infographic says that, “48% of buyers are frustrated with aggressive salespeople.”
WOW! Stop the presses! Aggressive salespeople?? So, although some percentage of salespeople have been aggressive since the dawn of time, NOW – because of social tools and social “selling” – 1 million salespeople will lose their jobs over the next five years?
I’ve got news for you. The truth is, many social sellers are ridiculously aggressive, and customers despise them just as bad as the in-person variety.
But, to the point – the closer is dead?
Ridiculous.
Someone has to help a customer navigate the complexity and information overload that exists. The salesperson who can do that effectively and “close” the business will thrive in the current sales environment.
And I can personally vouch for any number of companies that would dearly love to hire some more closers.
Uh huh.
And people no longer have to communicate in-person because phone, email, text, Twitter, Snapchat, and a hundred other tools have perfected communication.
I would dispute that number, but it’s largely irrelevant to my rebuttal anyway.
What I am supposed to believe is that those buyers – who “know what they want” – don’t need salespeople because product knowledge is all those salespeople provide.
Or, that “knowing what you want” translates into knowing exactly what you want to buy.
Of course, both are nonsense, and are faulty logically.
I would agree that most average (or worse) salespeople are nothing more than product pushers, so their worth will definitely continue to decline. And companies do need to change and “evolve” in order to integrate social tools into their sales/marketing processes as the infographic suggests.
But evolution suggests change and adaptation, not the complete elimination of a role.
The truth is, as I mentioned earlier, that complexity and information overload actually mandate the need for a professional, consultative salesperson. And people who know “what” they want, still have to choose from multiple vendors with widely different solution ideas.
All of these things being said, there is one aspect of the infographic that I completely agree with, and that is the decline of the “order taker.”
Of course, I’ve always thought the order taker was an endangered species, but with the emergence of online tools that make transactional purchases so easy, extinction of the order taker is a very real possibility.
Kelly Riggs is a business performance coach and founder of the Business LockerRoom. A former national Salesperson of the Year and serial entrepreneur, Kelly is a recognized thought leader in the areas of sales, management leadership, and strategic planning. He serves clients ranging from small, privately held companies to Fortune 500 firms. Kelly has written two books: “1-on-1 Management™: What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t” and “Quit Whining and Start SELLING! A Step-by-Step Guide to a Hall of Fame Career in Sales.”
