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Today I reflected on being a sales professional in the age of Text Messages and Snapchat, and came to the following realizations (perhaps suppositions):
1: People are less likely to buy from seeing words on a screen
2: Videos/visuals can help, but many people lack the patience to watch a video - several minutes in length - when a phone conversation allows for a greater sharing of ideas. Simply put, a phone conversation is more "two sided" than reading text messages and watching videos
3: The more that society views talking on the phone as a nuisance (at best) or something that they don't want to do at all (at worst), the less likely a sales transaction will take place.
4: If the sales profession declines, our consumer-based economy will suffer. Automation may only lead to robots selling/clerking to other robots.
Please let me know if I'm far off base here - I can take the heat/criticism.
I must admit that - as a 25+ year sales professional, I've never seen less options for products to sell nor a more depressed atmosphere/mood where nobody cares to even listen to the ideas of another person when it comes to products.
It's worse in 2018 than even at the height of the Great Recession 2008-2010.
Maybe I should go back to school and learn Coding?
I'm not a sales professional, but I agree with your concerns. There seems to be a desperation in the ad industry, as if they believe that if you keep bothering people through telephone, radio, television, and internet ads, they will buy your product.
Do you remember when Star Trek was 52 minutes of program, and 8 minutes of ads? I do. Do you remember when you could listen to commercial radio without hearing a 6 commercial marathon? I do. And since when did surveys become interrogations? The local school district wants us to answer a 36 question phone survey, or perhaps take it online.
Worst of all are the charitable and political organizations, which seem to exist for the sole purpose of continuous fundraising. If I donate $25, I expect it to be used to further the goals of the organization; not spent on additional appeals for more money.
I spent many years in sales when I was younger and I tend to agree with you. I think business to business sales will survive, but direct sales to consumers will die out.
A profession will continue to decline, but the effect on the economy will be next to nothing, on the surface.
People will still spend money of course. And somebody will collect that money.
The biggest change will be to the types of skills that can make someone a living, and at what income. But I suspect a people person with persuasion skills will always have avenues, not that those avenues are necessarily growing statistically. And some people won't translate well, and will end up making service wages.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by engineman
We have a land line, before you can talk to us you have to pass the "caller ID" test. If we don't know you, we don't pick up.
We are doing more and more shopping online.
Same here. The only time I succumb to advertising is when an ad pops up on Facebook or other electronic media that is for a really good deal. Even then I will check prices online at other places before buying. The ads based on prior searches are the current sales tool that seems to work. The other is the "discount after search and not buy." I will often search, find something I want online, put it into a shopping cart and then
ignore it. Within a few hours or a day I will get offered a discount of at least 10% from that vendor.
Type 1: Availability. Example: the market for paperclips.
Type 2: Price & Availability. Example: the trading futures contracts on pork bellies and corn. (The fact that a seller screwed a buyer yesterday has no bearing on today's transaction).
Type 3: Technical sales. Example: sales engineers selling engineered lubricants, chemicals, electronic components and the like - it is about the technical characteristics of the product
Type 4: Relationship sales. These are long term business relationships between one business and another, frequently are multinational, and facilitates commerce. For example, when the invoice arrives in English and by law it must also be in French, one low level clerk calls a counterpart at the other company and the problem is solved rather than escalating. Relationship sales give you preferred vendor status so you can do things like decline a piece of business (say, providing 24x7 support in a war-torn region).
There are probably some others I'm missing OTTOMH.
I think it really depends on the kind of market segment.
Very sick of people thinking Coding is the only job in this world. How will society survive without accountants, engineers, administrative assistants, customer service people, shipping, receiving, retail, importing goods, janitors, warehousing, and nurses?
Anyway, I agree that if you e-mail me, I will delete it. Phone calls really do help increase sales because sales people are so damn pushy, and I'm not a cold person to hang up on you.
I don't see how the telephone will disappear completely. When the person actually answers the phone, you get an answer immediately. But people will ignore e-mails.
from what I've been reading, there will be many jobs for displaced/disrupted white collar workers in the robot/Automation repairs and programming industries.
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