This is a question from a famous company’s post and it could have just as easily been “do CEOs need salespeople?”
The important thing about this question is the way it is posed. It is presented as if there is a YES or NO answer and that may not be true.
The next time you stop for gas, or milk ask yourself if you need a sales person to make these purchases and if you would pay for that help?
In another situation imagine your business was going to move your company’s data and applications from a secure server at your headquarters to the cloud? Would you need someone to explain how the transition works, or what the risks are, or how those risks are managed or removed, or what are the financial considerations of moving vs. not moving, or how security and backup differ or the impact on staffing if you changed to the cloud? Would you need someone to talk with, to help you with what you don’t know and someone to be sure you are getting the support you need? If you need that someone would you expect to pay for that support as part of the engagement?
Most of us would prefer no salesperson for milk or gas yet want support during the process for a cloud migration. The result is the answer to the questions are is absolutely NO and absolutely YES.
These are diagnostic questions that the buyer answers for themselves and the CEO can answer based on the target buyer behaviors and the outcomes to achieve.
Maybe this is not about “salespeople” at all. Maybe this is about the selling function and how it supports different buyer profiles and different offers. Maybe in some cases we need sales people until we move to a place where we don’t need salespeople?
For decades people called the Sears catalog 800 number to talk with a sales person and / or answered unsolicited calls at dinner to hear about insurance because without the sales person the process was hard or near impossible.
The real world has demonstrated the answer to the question “does anybody still need salespeople” is both YES and NO. The Sears catalog is no longer a major income source since seldom does anyone call. The remaining dinner interruption sales calls can go away because the buyers will use the internet to get insurance.
Selling is a required process and yet some of the world’s bestselling organizations have few or no salespersons (Amazon, Google, Quicken Loans, and Lending Tree). Sometimes salespersons add great value and sometimes they can be a costly inhibitor for both the buyer and the CEO.
Last century a great sales person was one who was in the right place at the right time and wrote LOTS of orders. Today a great sales person is one who adds value that compels the buyer to buy, in a shorter period of time and to pay for the full value delivered (including paying for the salesperson).
For the CEO their job is to match the selling process with problem the buyer is compelled to solve. The buyers know if they need the value provided by the salesperson or if they prefer the value from a selling process with no salesperson that functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with an internet full of details, recommendations and customer history.
So remove the meaningless generic questions and replace them with “how to make the selling process deliver the most value to the buyer!”