In a recent survey of contacts, I asked the question, have sales got easier or harder over the time that you have been working in the role? The majority believed that it has got harder. These are the results:
Easier 25%
No change 8%
Harder 67%
It is worth looking into some of the reasons for these results.
Why do people think that it has got easier?
In general, this came down to two main reasons:
1. Confidence, skills and experience
2. Better tools to help.
Without a doubt, getting more experience in any role will make you more effective in delivering the role. Growing your skills will make you better at doing the job and so it should be easier as a result. Of course, this can have a different impact in that as you get more experienced, you are given more challenging clients to work with so your role becomes more difficult.
Technology has also changed dramatically over the last 25 years which has made many aspects of the role easier. Social media allows us to broadcast to a much wider audience than was possible in the past; remote working is much easier and having meetings with customers is much easier with the use of digital meeting rooms.
Clearly, with more years of experience, sales people have more contacts and are trusted more by those contacts which makes it easier to do the job. We can extend that to our knowledge about our customers grows over time so we are more aware of their projects and goals.
Why do people think that it has got harder?
There are more reasons why sales have got more difficult over the years and interestingly, are somewhat related to the reasons that it has got easier!
1. There are more digital meetings so you lose face to face meetings and the chance to build better relationships and trust with your customer.
2. Customer’s bureaucracy has increased with more dealing with procurement, making personal relationships less useful. Quite often, this is associated with higher levels of authority needed to gain approval to proceed.
3. Increased competition clearly makes the sales process harder. Quite often, as a result, the buyer is more informed about their possible choices which makes the process more time consuming and challenging.
4. Sales processes have become more challenging, more from internal requirements than from external requirements.
5. Contracts and the legal terms associated with them have become more complicated so take longer to negotiate. This is also associated with customer requirements to conform to regulations which results in more complicated processes.
Obviously, the conditions within each market place will have a dramatic impact on how easy or difficult sales are. When the market is buoyant, sales are easier and vice versa.
The other interesting result from this was that the was no correlation between experience and whether sales have got easier or harder. The spread of experience in the respondents who chose easier was 1-25 years and those that thought it had got harder had between 1 and 35 years of experience. So, despite the fact that skills and experience made sales easier, some people still think that it has got harder.