The New Way Of Selling vs. The Cult Of The Sales Amateur.

From selling to co-creation, a great book I have recently read, written by Régis Lemmens, talks about the future of sales. I would advise every sales professional to buy and read this amazing book. Not because you will or have to agree on everything it says, but it will force you to analyse and potentially review your current convictions on what sales is today and what it will be tomorrow. I am sure that there is a 99 percent chance that sales isn't what you think it is today and it wont be what you think it'll be tomorrow. That's why I think you should take the effort to buy it or order it online.

I firmly believe that the story the book is telling, is most importantly a true story. Sales is changing at a vast speed. As the CEO of a cutting edge sales company, of course this is no news to us. More so, we have made it our core business to anticipate on that change and to stay ahead of our competitors, just like the author of this book.

The book offers it's readers a great reality check, with facts such as that in ten years, only ten percent of every sales-slot out there, will survive this new way of selling. Due an increasing sales automatisation and a new trend, the transfer of sales towards great batteries of much cheaper call centers, thus replacing sales all together. If all that information scares you, it's time to move to that call center and get out of sales...

On top of that fact, 95 procent of the sales professionals who will read this book, will throw it in a corner or potentially worse, quickly burn it in their office trash bins or hunt it through a company shredder to remove all existing evidence of the fact that sales really is changing. It's rather easy to deny or avoid this change or trying to get away with a pseudo-change. So many people are trying to get away with their pseudo-adaptions. The magic clearly isn't happening over there, since it's equally clearly happening over here.

There is, however, something that I think this book has overseen. A proper analysation of the current existing sales force (= people) as it is vs. what it should be. This book talks a lot about processes rather than about people, the right people. Despite it is the absolute truth that indeed, relations nowadays are business to business, rather than people to people, I find that this book clearly has found peace with organisations having to face "the average sales rep." and how to automatise their daily routines from average to very average.

The truth of the manner is, only 1 up to 5 procent, not 10 procent, of the total sales force out there are true professionals. For every real sales professional I have ever met, I have seen a 100 or potentially even hundreds of amateurs, sales hobbyists I call them . They don't know what they're doing and to be honest, with all my experience, even I don't remotely know what the hell they are doing.. . That's a whole lot of dinosaurs, facing a future extinction and I kid you not, this will happen, rather sooner than later.

Of course, we firmly believe in (and preach) solution selling rather than selling and we firmly believe in the (semi-) sales automatisation processes we apply on a daily basis. We too, use call center batteries, with our own semi-automated process of lead generation and prospecting by phone (wherever it is appropriate).

That being said, I have grown a great personal disgust for the words sales automatisation since there is absolutely, no way in the world, such a thing exists, beyond web-shops that indeed killed a lot of jobs in sales - rightfully if I might add. If there is no added value, this is indeed the right thing to do. But in the spirit of solution selling, there are many products and services that are just not suitable for a full automated process and need a true professional. This is where we come in...

These vast armies of average sales, make us all seem like robots that need to be fully automatised. I recon that they indeed need that guidance and support of sales-automatisation but what with the real professionals amongst us? Not the amateurs and not the cowboys. There is no need to automatise their way of selling, since it's working like a charm. Pure Darwinism, they already adapted to the situation and evolved as professionals into the new way of (solution) selling. These true professionals guide themselves and at rare moments, they need minor readjustments and support to realise what seemed unrealisable on a daily basis. These are the true sales heroes, we, are the true sales heroes.

Last but not least, I do not believe in killing the grey area for the true sales professionals, which has been abused over and over again by these sales hobbyists. I understand the reasoning of the idea of killing the grey zone... only it's a very wrong reasoning. Every true sales professional (the 1 up to 5 percent of all sales I talked about earlier) are totally rock and roll. We, Sales Guerrillas are totally rock and roll. Guided missiles that go for their target, being serving people and rendering an impeccable service that builds bridges the size of the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge.

A long story short, every CEO should indeed revise his or her sales organisation, but rather than finding solutions for the bare average and accepting it for what it is, invest in finding the right people. Like we compose and handpick every team member for every project we work on, to guaranty that average, is just out of the question. Stop accepting average today and go for excellence tomorrow.