What is the sales profession going to be like in the year 2050?
Remember the 1969 song “In The Year 2525?”
If you’re too young to remember the song, you better pay attention.
If you do remember the song, you may choose to read out of commitment to the industry or mere fascination as to what things will be like.
Who knows what 2050 is going to be like, but let’s go ahead and think for moment as to what we might be experiencing.
Channel selling will be non-existent.
The ability that exists today to segment the market into channels will be virtually non-existent in the year 2050, due to the demands of the marketplace. With customers being able to buy anything anywhere, the traditional channel selling concept simply does not have a reason to exist.
This change is going to be the biggest hurdle for salespeople to get over.
What it means is that salespeople in the year 2050 are going to have to be comfortable interfacing with any type of customer. Specialization will be far more difficult, requiring salespeople to become extremely adept at understanding customers even more.
Time will be viewed as a currency.
Due to the speed with which markets change and evolve, time will become even more important than ever.
The ability for a salesperson to deal with a customer is going to be far more important. Markets will come and go in mere months and significant opportunities will come and go in a few hours.
This change is going to put even more pressure on the supply-chain, and the salesperson is going to have to be able to have knowledge of (and possibly control of) each part of it.
Geographical limitations will be non-existent.
The only thing close to a geographical limitation blocking one person from selling to another person will be due to political/government-imposed boundaries.
What this means is the salesperson of tomorrow will be doing more travel than ever. It will just be fewer trips, yet longer trips, than today.
Customers will know as much about what they want to buy as the salesperson knows.
The only two things the salesperson will be able to bring to the party is the ability to correctly educate the customer and ask great questions.
The internet may be able to dispense immense amounts of information, but much of it can be misunderstood or misapplied. This makes the role of the salesperson the “internet corrector.”
So what do you think? How will the sales industry change in the decades to come?
Copyright 2014, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
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