Death of the Salesman

There's no question that the Willy Lomans of this world have been dying a slow, agonizing death—only instead of losing the fight to travel exhaustion, the opponent is the Internet.

According to a recent CEB article in the Harvard Business Review, 57 percent of purchase decisions are made before a customer ever talks to a supplier, and Gartner Research predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. That shouldn't surprise anyone since we spend much of our days tapping on keyboards or flicking our fingers across tiny screens.

In Willy's day, the lead generation process would have consisted of making a phone call, setting up an appointment, hopping a plane to the prospect's office, and dragging a sample case through the airport. In the 1980's, that sample case turned into an overhead projector, then a slide projector and a laptop, and finally a mini projector linked to a mobile device or thumb drive. In 2014, salespeople are lucky if they can connect to a prospect on a video conferencing call.

Clearly the days of gathering in a conference room for the sales pitch are long gone. We've always known that sales people talk too much and buyers, who've never had the patience to listen, now have the tools to avoid them altogether: websites, whitepapers, case studies, videos, LinkedIn groups, webcasts—virtually anything and everything to avoid talking to sales.

As a result, the sales function has now been placed squarely in the hands of the content strategists and creators. And yes, that means that the sales function is now in the hands of marketing.

Now a different problem exists. Most marketing folks don't know how to help the buyer along their journey because that's not how they've been trained. They have no idea how different types of buyers think, or how they search for information, or make decisions, so they don't know how to create nor position content in a meaningful and relevant way—and that's long been the complaint of sales. In their opinion, all marketing does is churn out "fluff" that is irrelevant to a serious buyer.