Of course not. But sales people seem to be under invested and not equipped for the job they do today.
If you look at professions like Accountancy, Law, even Marketing, there is a qualification, but that isn't it. To maintain that qualification and continue to practice, there is a program of continued learning. That's not something we see in sales. Some sales people are lucky enough to work for companies that invest in training, but then don't take the training, some sales people are not.
It is possible, therefore, that a sales person can be 20 years without any training, or in fact, no training at all.
If we look at Retail, everybody is talking about the change in retail, there is an admission that people buy differently. But in B2B sales there seems to be total denial.
While we all know about this change but as soon as we get to our desks we do the same things we have always done and expect to get the same results. Or ask for more budget to get the same result as we know the results are going down so just spend more money to get the same result.
It reminds me of cold calling inflation, which is the number of calls you have to increase year-on-year to get the same result. When we all know things have changed and in fact it's broken.
But what can we do?
At this point I'm going to mention that we have clients do $1 Million deals through social .... that's all I'm going to say, as I don't want to sell to you.
Good luck and you know where we are.
Give us the blunt truth. Are sales people getting worse at their jobs? No, it’s not that sales people are getting worse, it’s that in too many cases their managers expect them to do what they did in the past and deliver the same results. The rules of sales have changed. Back in 1991 when I began my career, sales people were the primary source of information for customers. It was their job to know all about the product. Buyers had no other way of learning about what was on offer.
unknownx500
