Don’t be fooled by the dot-com collapse; the role of the sales force still faces inexorable change
The dot-com implosion is already yesterday’s news. But if you’re in sales, the Internet is still in the process of changing your life.
The collapse of many Internet-based companies, and the free-fall of tech stocks in general, over the last year might seem to undermine the message I’ve been preaching in these pages that the digital revolution is transforming the sales profession.
Indeed, for most industries, this so-called revolution has turned out to be anything but that. Many in sales may look at the dot-com bubble bursting and think, “I dodged that Internet bullet!” Even my own clients have asked me if that bullet was just another phony trend, one they don’t have to worry about after all.
The answer is, absolutely not. Complacency is deadly. People in sales need to be just as concerned now – in fact, even more so – as a year ago about the fundamental changes technology has brought to the way they do business.
As Business Week noted in its March 26 issue: “Strip away all the highfalutin’ talk and, at the bottom, the Internet is a tool that dramatically lowers the cost of communication. That means it can radically alter any industry or activity that depends heavily on the flow of information.”
So your local furniture store probably won’t close its doors soon because it lost all its customers to furniture.com, because the flow of information plays only a small role in the furniture business. That’s partly why furniture.com has joined scores of other on-line companies in filing for bankruptcy protection.
But information flow is central to a business-to-business sales operation – it’s what sales does. Consequently, sales and salespeople remain squarely in the crosshairs of a very real Internet bullet.
Make no mistake: the Internet will continue to play a key role in the go-to-market strategies of forward-thinking companies, affecting how a company employs its direct sales force, resellers, and other channels. The model of a single sales channel – particularly if it is a direct sales force – remains an anachronism. Despite the current hiccups in the tech economy, the Internet and other low-cost channels will be the channels of choice for all but the highest-value sales activities. Intel founder Andy Grove’s observation that “salespeople are not going to be involved with order taking and information flow at the most basic level” is no less true today than when he made the remark four years ago.
So what will remain for the direct sales force? Only those activities that bring high value to the seller and the customer alike. Identifying those activities, however, may bring some surprises.
Direct-sales people must think about shedding a wide range of low-value activities, especially when they’re conducted face-to-face. They include:
So what are those high-value activities? Many have parallels to the low-value ones. They include:
Notice that the list is much smaller. Someone once said the secret to good management isn’t just doing things right, it’s doing the right things. The same is true in the new era of selling. The difference? In selling’s old era, no one really knew what the right things were.
Jerry Stapleton is president of the IBS Group based in Elm Grove; www.theibsgroup.com. He can be reached directly at 262-784-0812. For a copy of the IBS white paper, “From Vendor to Business Resource”, fax your request on letterhead to 262-784-0841. His column appears in every other issue of SBT.
April 13, 2001 Small Business Times
