The Future of Sales

For years there’s been a noticeable overlap between sales & marketing. More recently, especially in SaaS, sales & marketing are coming together as one “Revenue” organization to encourage alignment on vision, mission, and OKRs.

As these teams continue blending together, sales will face a larger transition than our marketing counterparts. There’s an exhaustive list of changes that salespeople will need to accept, here are a few:

• Personality Type: There’s a lot to unpack here (see below) but long story short; the future salesperson will be one who is naturally more interested in solving problems and helping people, opposed to having the mindset of ‘closing deals and making money.’

• Role Purpose: for the last +100 years, it’s been about “straight-line selling” with little value placed on customer experience. As we all know, that tide is changing. Customer experience trumps everything. Moving forward, salespeople will have to be comfortable with not “going for the kill” and truly being a solution-oriented partner at all times. The Jordan Belfort-types will not be successful in the future (or right now). Of course, OKRs and compensation need to align. That’s a bigger conversation.

• Personal Branding: success will belong to those who have a clear and strong online personal brand. Think about the kids currently in high school and college - they’re going to enter the workforce with a personal brand, a long history of social media, and a potentially massive network depending on how they’ve leveraged social platforms throughout their life. A strong personal brand is absolutely imperative to professionals who want to generate revenue for themselves or their company in the future. You don’t want to be the career salesperson who used to be at the top of game but became irrelevant because you didn’t adapt to the new rules. Start building your brand now.

• Content Marketing: this goes hand-in-hand with personal branding. You’re seeing a lot of people on Linkedin with quickly growing audiences, and those people are winning. For themselves and for their company. To be clear, “content marketing” is as simple as putting your unique perspective into the world via social platforms, newsletters, etc. Whether you’re talking about the industry your company is in or simply sharing sales insights - if you’re building an audience you’re building awareness for you and your company. Show that you are an expert of anything and your credibility will stand the test of time.

• Communities: This ties back to not being the stereotypical salesperson. Communities are about engagement, learning, support, and resources. They are not about selling (ever), pushing people to chat off-platform, annoyingly following up outside of the community. None of that. Buyers have more control than ever before and they’re going to continue to gain control. Our responsibility as salespeople is to build familiarity and offer educated perspective as an active participant in the community conversation, so that when they are ready to buy, they see us as the most credible option. And this is just the beginning of the changes to come. There’s more conversation to be had around technical expertise, partnerships, OKRs and compensation, and more.

When I started this newsletter I had two goals in mind:

1.Help salespeople improve the skills we need to day - cold outreach.

2.Begin preparing for the future of sales - content & community. This is coming faster than expected so I’ll be discussing this more often.

Who knows, the ‘Sales’ job title may change altogether at some point. The relationship between us and our customers is changing rapidly and we need to be willing to adapt accordingly, at all times.

Keep an eye on the future folks, it’s here.