By Professor Willem Verbeke
The other day I was invited by the Sales Educators' Academy (SEA) at Aston University in England to give the dinner speech on sales. During such a conference, it is good to listen to other speakers, from both Europe and the US, who are otherwise quite progressive in doing research on sales. What struck me is the new sobriety around sales that was emphasized by many speakers. What is this new sobriety?
The "it's going to change gurus"
If you're a manager or a professor who wants to score at conferences you're supposed to start your talk by saying, "It's all going to change." As one speaker at the SEA noted, that's quite a catchy phrase and after a while all the speakers say that everything is going to change. I like to call them the "it's going to change gurus" whereby I hope the reader gets a smile on his/her face in doing so. By the way, if someone does not utter the phrase "it's going to change" they are considered conservative. But if you ask what is going to change, they can't explain it very well.
The fundamentals remain, but the context changes
Of course business is changing, but some basic values remain. One example is sales. While the "it's going to change gurus" predicted that we would see the end of sales because the Internet would take over everything, it turns out that sales has become one of the most attractive functions within a company. How is it possible that these "it's going to change gurus" are so wrong?
To think properly about the sales profession, you have to distinguish the essence of the job from the context. Sales is and will always be a people business: for example, salespeople/account managers will be judged by their customers on customer satisfaction, will have to make offers, be rejected and keep promises. These processes will remain unchanged in sales. What does change is the context in which this happens: in business there have been changes such as development in CRM, Internet, business intelligence, etc. But these developments are integrated by good salespeople/account managers.
The mistake the "it's going to change gurus" make is thinking that a technology will make the sales profession obsolete. But people are very creative, which means they adopt technologies by integrating them into their profession and continue to work with them. To give an example, the text I write here is based on knowledge I have acquired through hard work over the years. I used to type my texts on a typewriter but now I use the computer. The "it's going to change gurus" think that the computer could replace my "thinking," but of course it doesn't. The computer does give me the ability to change sentences as I type, or store information, etc. However, the computer cannot think what I think. It is a tool and has no brain.
Following the same reasoning, the "it's going to change gurus" thought the computer was going to take over the sales profession. But sales is done by people and people should trust each other, talk to each other and learn from each other.
In short: every profession has an essence, and in sales, that essence is human contact to avoid communication errors, for example, and to reach a contract. People who think soberly always keep that essence in mind and study how context affects human behavior. So we can expect to just start talking about sales, people, emotions, customer focus, etc. again in the sales profession. We are going to have a great time.
