I recently read and listened to on Brian Carroll's blog, B2B Lead Generation Blog, an interesting Podcast about the new role of sales as expert content filters. Brian brings up the notion that today's role for sales people has changed due to the advent of the Internet. Therefore, allowing buyers to take control away from marketers and sales professionals. I agree with this and it has made for a complex world indeed. So, where is the future of selling headed? What is the role of sales professionals in the future? Brian offers one view of sales professionals being expert content filters. Without question, the Internet brings up a "Catch 22" situation for buyers today. On one hand, there is voluminous information available to research solutions. On the other hand, it can make the job of evaluating options and solutions quite tedious and time consuming.
Brian talks about how sales professionals can add value to the buying process by not being information providers but information filters who help the buyer to navigate the information overload. This leads to the importance in the future of knowing who your buyers are, how they go about researching and making decisions, and why they do the type of research they do and most importantly - why are they making decisions they are making. Buyer personas will need to be a part of every sales professional's knowledge base in the future. Having deep insight into who your buyers are and how and why they make purchasing decisions will need to be a part of every professional development plan.
How will sales executives, marketing, and sales support play a role in the future? They will have to be the purveyors of knowledge about not only buyer personas, but also of gaining insight into the buying processes of their customers. Creating and understanding buying cycle scenarios will be critical to not only guide the sales processes but to guide the development of sales messaging. The fine art of knowing when to position sales messaging at the various stages of buying cycles can be the difference from a competitive standpoint.
Circling back to Brian's point of sales professionals being expert content filters; messaging and content development will be a requirement for all sales professionals and support functions in the future. Thus, making it essential to create buyer personas and buying cycle scenarios that become part of a company's knowledge base of customer understanding. This actually makes for a very exciting future!
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