Forrester estimated that 1 million sellers would be out of their jobs by 2020 in the United States!
Source: Forrester 2015 Death of Salesman report. They estimated a decline of 1M€ sellers, from 4.5 to 3.5 million from 2015 to 2020.
I would have had more respect for them if they would have called it what it should have been called.
The death of the Product-centric seller!
We still need all kinds of people within the sales organization, but only the best salespeople will survive, and the rest will thrive (in other roles), not die. The product-centric sales role is being replaced by other positions that are greatly needed to achieve commercial success.
For the purposes of this blog, I’ll define the three types of sellers by the approach they take.
Product seller = Product centric sales approach
Solution seller = Focused on solving problems. Especially good in situations where customers have identified they have problems that need to be solved.
Consultative seller = Focused on helping customers achieve business outcomes. These sellers are often excellent at creating demand, by understanding the customers goals and identifying what is stopping them from achieving these goals. Consultative sellers often predict the future and where the company is heading in order to help the customer make important investment decisions.
Below is a short story on the evolution of the structure of the sales organization
People need to be re-trained and the organization needs to be re-configured with different types of roles. We are at a point where we need to re-define who “sells”. A growth hacker who can get customers to order millions a year through e-commerce in spare parts for example, is doing a whole lot of selling, right? A broader amount of roles will are selling in the new organization.
Pre-internet Age
Sellers had the power over customers. We already knew in the pre-internet age that sellers who asked questions and tried to diagnose customer problems were doing better than product focused sellers, but all kinds of sellers could still make a living.
The internet came along
Slowly but surely the need for Product focused sellers started diminishing…With e-commerce, websites, marketing automation, search engines and so on, customers no longer rely on product sellers for information.
The new structure of the B2B sales organization
The category of what product sellers used to do has been replaced by multiple roles. Now with the technology available we can do product sales in a much more intelligent and customers centric way than in the pre-internet era.
To this last picture we could also add roles like: business development reps, customer success and so on. There is definitely room for many new roles and specialization within the sales organization, which was not the case before. This is my take on the evolution of the structure of the B2B sales organization.
Do you agree with my thoughts? You can comment here in any language you’d like!