There – I said it – the IT sales rep as we know it will become extinct over time. Let me be a bit more specific here... I am referring to the expensive, bag carrying, face-to-face outside direct sales rep. Overtime they will go the way of the dinosaur - actually it's already happening.
If that’s too drastic for you – you can stop reading here. But before you do that take a look at this graphic I found on a Hubspot blog post. Yikes! It's not just IT sales reps that are vanishing it's the entire profession!
Actually I was going to title this blog “Death of the Salesman” as in the 1949 play written by Arthur Miller but I said “that is fiction – this is real”.
I’ve been in tech sales my entire career and sometimes think that I’ve seen it all – until now. Over the past 10+ years I’ve watched the decline of a tech sales model based on traditional sales reps searching for prospects (with some help from marketing) using trains, planes and automobiles and playing the numbers game. That traditional sales model all adds up to a very high cost of sales. In the days of selling 6 figure six deals at nice margin where you get that sweet revenue up front, all is fine. But when is comes to selling everything "as-a-service", COC (Cost of Customer Acquisition) is everything!!!, the math must work.
However, during these same years that old model has given way to a much lower cost and marketing-driven program of “getting found” by buyers who progress through the buying process on their own terms and make their own way into the buyer's zone. This model is called digital aka inbound marketing and I have seen it explode mostly with technology vendors such as SaaS ISVs and born-in-the-cloud providers. These companies don't have a legacy on-prem, product-sales business that carries the high cost of the traditional sales and marketing model. As I work with these SaaS ISVs and born in the cloud providers, I advise them to start with a very sharp “tip of the arrow” value proposition and a very targeted buyer “persona” and then ask themselves: "what important business problems do we solve and for whom do we solve them?" These are the 2 basic pillars to build from.
The next step is to “go to the gym.” That means embarking upon the daily routine of creating remarkable content (blogs, eBooks, videos, webinars, etc.) around their razor sharp differentiated value prop and persona. Then they must deliver this content through “get-found” channels (blogs, SEO, SMM, etc.) and manage the funnel of website visitors that consume their remarkable content to nurture them from visitor to lead to prospect to customer.
These cloud providers range from 1-man bands to multi-million dollar companies and they all have 1 goal - achieve a low cost of customer acquisition. They completely understand that today the buyer is much more in charge of the sales process. I would argue that yesterday the seller was in charge of 75% of the sales process (searching for a prospect, educating the prospect and leading a sales process) while today the buyers are in charge of 75% of the sales process as they search for solutions to their problems, educate themselves and evaluate options.
What’s the moral to the story? Traditional outbound sales and marketing does not work when selling recurring revenue based cloud services – the math simply doesn’t make sense for the business. But now there is a proven answer and that answer is inbound sales and marketing.
And if you're a VAR, MSP, CSP, telecom agent, manufacturers rep (if you have a pulse) and want to introduce "Digital Marketing-as-a-Service" to your clients and make some great Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) let's chat!!!
