We’ve all seen and felt the shift over the last five years.
The buying cycles are longer than ever, it’s harder than ever to get your foot in the door, and even when you do, you have fewer opportunities than ever to make meaningful contact and steer the deal towards closing.
There are a plethora of reasons for why sales is in the state it’s in. The aftershocks of the pandemic are still rippling through the market. The explosion of digital access and self-led research means that first engagement with a seller is moving further and further back in the buying process. Budgets are smaller and more tightly guarded in an uncertain, hyper-reactive economy.
The picture, in short, looks pretty bleak.
Sales is dead.
Or at least, sales as we have always known it is dead.
The truth is, sales is dead because buying has fundamentally changed and sellers simply have not responded quickly enough.
The traditional methodologies and principles and frameworks we all learned when we were first cutting our teeth in sales have served us faithfully, but the time has come (and indeed came years ago) to adapt them, or put them aside entirely.
If sales is a jungle, then we shouldn’t be surprised that Darwinian forces are at play; we’re just on the wrong side of the selection process.
Adapt Or Die
In the jungle, you adapt or you die, and the same is true in the world of sales. The more agile, more responsive, more adaptable sellers will adapt to the new ruleset being established by the modern buyer, and they will thrive.
The more rigid, more stubborn, more one-dimensional sellers will continue to struggle, and those struggles will only amplify as the shift of the last five years accelerates.
This also has huge ramifications for new and graduate sellers taking their first steps in sales. If we teach them the same lessons we were taught- the lessons that no longer yield the answers we need – then they’re going be in the same sinking ship right from the get go.
What, then, is the answer to the problem?
The light at the end of the tunnel is this; sales may be dead, but selling is alive and kicking.
