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SELLING, MORE ALIVE THAN DEAD
Tuesday Apr. 3, 2018
Sales, marketing, advertising, commerce, trade – all the same, right?
I was pondering Death of a Salesman. We all remember that Pulitzer Prize winning Arthur Miller play, right? Or maybe you just remember the movie – done a couple of times. Complex tale of man rendered obsolete in his field – by times and circumstance and character flaws …
Today we have technology opening endless frontiers of opportunity while at the same time slamming closed so many doors that used to mean jobs, careers and futures. Not death of any particular field, but change erodes much of what used to be ‘essentials of the craft’ especially for salesmen. Saleswomen too …
Product knowledge and selling skills are in many cases unnecessary luxuries that has been priced out of commodities; first replaced by clerks without skill, further eroded by self-service retailing, B-to-B commerce. In the point/click world ‘everybody can have all the information’, shipping is speedy and costs are driven lower and lower. As our expectation that people we contact will have deep knowledge of their product, of customer problems or the skill to sell or solve …
It’s like that sign at Wal-mart – ‘reducing prices every day’ – one wonders if we should come back when they reach zero …
Selling is largely a lost art – still available in high-end retail, specialty goods and services and in real estate. I’ve sold goods (footwear was my field), services (office services, process serving, property management, receiverships, collections, publishing) and real estate (sales, leasing, consulting, P3, land assembly). I’ve been selling since I was 17. Today it’s writing, speaking, coaching, publishing and real estate.
Tomorrow, meaning the future, will likely seem me add new things to my repertoire – probably still selling, always selling something. We all do, one way or another, don’t we? Unless we are giving (volunteering) our time and labour away, we are selling our services. Technology and new industries are rendering so many jobs/careers and processes obsolete – every day. But we shouldn’t feel badly about that – because there are so many new roles/jobs to be filled running businesses that never existed before, selling products that nobody thought of before – and soon those new goods and services will be mainstream. They will disrupt and render many things obsolete. Somewhere, in all of that whirl of trade and commerce, somebody is selling something to someone.
There will always be a Willy Loman losing out. On the other hand, someone will be launching something new – and they will need sales people to tell the story.
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