Sales Transformations in the Future

Predicting the future is risky—and we don’t have a crystal ball showing us future trends and patterns. Over the past several decades, enterprise business-to-business selling has significantly evolved given changes in technology and communications—air travel, fax, pager, mobile phone, the Internet, and social media, among others. Across many industries, this evolution has changed both the balance of knowledge between buyers and sellers and also the expectations buyers have of sellers. Historically, successful salespeople have differentiated themselves by the products and services they offer. But as we’ve discussed throughout this book, the days of a salesperson adding value by being a talking catalog and product configurator are long gone. Today’s top sales professionals, and their customers, leverage the full breadth of technology and communication tools to differentiate themselves and their conversations; a trend that we believe will not only endure but accelerate. As Don Perry told us, “If you take a look at the buyer of the old days and the buyer of today, in the old days sellers used to look for buyers; today buyers are looking for sellers. They research. Their business analysis and access to information have enabled them to get so far down in their buying cycle that the seller of today doesn’t look like the seller of yesterday. The buyer has pushed the seller to a level of specialization, and the consequence has changed the dynamics of the sales process. The Internet has made the seller better, and the buyer better.”