Sales 2.0: Are Traditional Salespeople Still Necessary?

AllBusiness.com’s Sales Advisor Keith Rosen interviews Evan Sohn, CEO of Salesconx.com.

Keith Rosen: Evan, thanks for joining us. You know, many people are talking about how they’re removing the salespeople from the sales process. Now, what’s your take on that?

Evan Sohn: That’s a great question. I think one of the things that Sales 2.0 really identifies is that we’re spending a lot of money on marketing. And marketing spend has really reached a very high level that we need to start optimizing spend, right? You know, if we weren’t really spending a lot of money on paper clips, we really don’t have to optimize the spending on paper clips. And I think it’s really recognizing that we’re spending a lot more money to drive leads. I think we’ve seen a real shift away from salespeople driving leads and salespeople driving business to the marketing department driving business, right? We’re seeing web analytics, this will, you know, put those leads through the funnel and down to the sales reps themselves. And while we’re empowering the sales rep, we’re actually saying, “Well, you know what? The sales rep isn’t actually as important as the data itself.” You know, I actually heard one of the co-founders of the one of the companies downstairs talk about that, you know, that sales and marketing is becoming or generating leads is becoming algorithmic. You know, whatever happened to sales guys like salespeople sorts generating business and those relationships? Whatever happened to that relationship being what was powerful and not algorithmic? It shouldn’t be. You know, business relationships and doing deals shouldn’t be about an algorithm. It should really be about building relationships and having those relationships that one could then, you know, take to fruition into a deal, into an agreement.

I think the other thing that Sales 2.0 has really done is sort of encapsulating that and a lot of what the internet has really done is disintermediated salespeople from the process. E-commerce basically says, “Hey, you know what? Company, let’s put up a banner ad and the buyer will come, see the ad and go buy your product.” Sales guy, sales process, you know, the whole notion of volume sales really says, “Well you know what? Let’s have a lower-priced salesperson sitting at the office and doing the deals that are really being generated, you know, from the leads coming in from marketing.” You know what, it’s really funny. One of our board of advisors is a, you know, all-time sales guy, right? Head of sales, etcetera. And he said, “You know, 20 years ago, we were cold calling. Right? Twenty years ago, cold calling was looking up a phone book, guy’s name, you know, calling up those numbers. And you know, 20 years later, we’re still cold calling. Now, we might be getting a lot more data, you know, use something like ZIPInfo or Spoke to get really phenomenal data but at the end of the day here I’m still picking up the phone and making a phone call. How has my life as an experienced salesperson really changed in terms of new business?” And I think those are some of the issues that Sales 2.0 is really bringing about.