Is Selling Dead Or Dying?

It’s interesting to see continued predictions of the death of selling. There are all sorts of variations. Some focus on PLG types of approaches, where the product sells itself–at least until one wants to scale that to the enterprise level. Others see the preference of buyers for rep-free buying experiences and digital buying processes as evidence that selling is no longer necessary.

It’s interesting, all of the articles I read about the death of selling comes from sellers, or “experts” on selling. I tend to read widely, one of the areas I study is the future of procurement. I never read procurement articles suggesting the death of sales. I actually never see anything about this other than within the selling community.

When one reads these articles, usually, the author is trying to sell the readers something. Hmmm, what am I missing?

Implicit in the thinking that selling is dying would be the concept that buying must be dying. One wonders the economic turmoil that would result if buying died. Imagining a world where companies are wholly self sufficient, not needing to buy anything to operate. But then one thinks, even if this happens, who buys their products? How would they survive if buying died?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that buying is highly unlikely to die.

So what does this mean about selling?

One might argue, we don’t need sellers to buy. We use our personal buying experiences to support this. After all, when I go to the supermarket, sales people aren’t pitching their wares to me. But then I think of all the sales people working with retailers, trying to get end-caps, eye level shelf space, promotions, and so forth. Or in many of the retail stores I go to, there are sales people–people who help me find the product I need. And even though I can go to Amazon or any of dozens of online sites, often I go to a retail store to learn, from a sales person, then I go to an online site to make the purchase.

So in those venues, selling isn’t dying, it’s different.

And as we see the data on B2B buying. Customers increasingly want rep free buying experiences. Every year we see the data on this ratchet up another notch. I think it’s about 80%+ now. We see buyers prefer digital buying journeys, suggesting the right websites, content, and marketing programs solve the customer buying challenges.

At the same time, we see contradictory data. Just as those preferring rep free buying experiences are increasing, the number of committed buying processes that end in no decision made is skyrocketing–at almost the same pace as those preferring rep-free buying experiences. And, on top of that, for those that do buy, we see YoY increases in buyer regret.

So buyers are still trying to buy (huge sigh of relief), but they are struggling and the rep-free buying experience or our strategies around seller free or product led buying has very severe limitations. Buyers are struggling to get what they need and to address their growth challenges.

As one goes through this thought process, we start to come to a conclusion that selling isn’t dying (as much as those guru’s want it to). But something seems broken. The way we are currently selling, the strategies, tactics, techniques that drive most of our selling strategies aren’t working. What we do is driving customers to seek alternative buying experiences–and they are failing.

So we start thinking, selling isn’t dying, there is an important tole sellers play to help customers with these complex buying decisions. But perhaps how we are selling is broken and we need to reinvent it.

And this is the issue that I think too many sellers and selling experts miss. Rather than thinking, “What do we need to change about what we do to more effectively engage and help our customers,” they keep doubling down doing what is less and less effective and is driving customers away. And technology promotes that. The marginal cost of doing more of the same is close to $0. So we just do more and more, producing less and less.

Is it only me, or is it time to recognize, THIS IS INSANITY!

Selling isn’t dying! If we just paid attention to our customers’ buying experiences, we see how much they struggle, how they fail. They need help, but not the “help” we currently provide.

We need to reinvent how we sell, how we engage customers, how we help them buy!

Selling isn’t dying, but selling has to change and be different–at least for complex B2B buying.

And for those that recognize this and are engaging their customers differently, we see such profound differences in performance.