Are sellers dying?

There is an opinion that the sales manager is a disappearing profession, and due to the influx of new technologies replacing people, there will simply be no need for salespeople soon. Today, there are many sales tools that are really capable of competing with people in one way or another – auto sales funnels, auto calls, targeting, chat bots and others. This is already a whole market, the services of which are resorted to by many companies. But can these innovations replace sales managers?

Of course not. Because already now, most of these “new” sales methods are ineffective. Emails are easily blocked by spam filters. Also, unwanted numbers on smartphones simply get banned or blacklisted. Advertising on the Internet is removed by the simplest blocker programs. The cost of a lead is rising, and since e-promotion is not cheap, the conversion can be low, and, therefore, the whole idea becomes simply unprofitable. In addition, technologies do not reach all regions of Russia as quickly as they do in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Therefore, people are still the main source of business prosperity and its most valuable resource. Merchants existed long before the advent of the Internet and are still relevant today. It is hard to imagine that someday we will be able to do without them. Maybe that time will come, but it will definitely not be soon. In the meantime, the human factor in sales plays an important and decisive role. Therefore, it is in the interests of any self-respecting organization to train their salespeople and invest in their development.

And if we talk about the “extinction” of sellers, then this, if it happens, is not due to the invasion of “future technologies”, but due to the fact that no one takes care of people in companies: sales managers do not have a focus on results ; they are bad at persuasion; they do not know how to ask the right questions to buyers and work with refusals, objections; speak sluggishly, quietly, indistinctly, without enthusiasm; they often do not give a damn about their product and their work; they are very restrained and pathologically afraid of people; they are not confident in their own abilities in principle … This list can be continued for a long time. Here are the real reasons – because of which the profession is really “dying out.”