Are sales people becoming obsolete

Are sales people becoming obsolete

Jiahao Yang

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianaltman/2017/05/16/are-sales-people-becoming-obsolete/#2a14b2633e93

In 21st century, there are some forces impacting sales management.

The first one is customer behavioral forces. Customers are becoming more and more educated and have more access to information. Customers are no longer in the passive position of information asymmetry. A growing number of customers start to have their own choice and preference towards certain products, despite how sales people try to change their opinion and lead them to another way. So the job of sales people in closing a deal and earning from information asymmetry has been weakened in a large scale due to customer’s switching from passive information receiver to active information seeker.

The second force is technological force. Much more things are now in the market to sell. It’s sales people’s job to remember all the detail product information on one catalogue. But as time goes by, thousands of new products come into market. It will be far beyond sales people’s ability to remember all of them. Computers and AI will eventually replace their job.