Rethinking the Salesperson’s role

19 June 2026

(The organization’s requirements have radically changed, but everyone’s too scared to break the news to the sales department!)

Walk into almost any B2B company today and you’ll find a sales department that looks and behaves pretty much as it did in the 1950s. The same job descriptions, the same compensation plans, the same lone-wolf operating system. Salespeople are still expected to prospect, build relationships, manage accounts, handle transactions, and own the customer.

The relationship is with the organization

Meanwhile, the organization itself has been transformed. Automated fulfillment, self-service portals, and sophisticated marketing automation have eliminated the requirement for salespeople to manage transactions and dispense information. A 20-year obsession with customer intimacy has shifted the relationship from the individual rep to the organization. And that’s a good thing.

When given a choice between a bank teller and a machine, customers choose the machine. And when given the choice between a salesperson in their plant or an engineer in a call center, increasingly, customers are choosing the latter.

Yet the sales department sails on, untouched. It has enormous inertia. Salespeople operate autonomously. They build books of business, and clip the ticket on every transaction. The role is complex, expensive, and almost impossible to manage. And salespeople are understandably resistant to anything beyond cosmetic change.

Sooner or later the music will stop.

Persuasion

The 1950’s sales model exposes organizations on two fronts. Competitors like Fastenal (with vendor-managed inventory), Robinhood (mobile-first investing), and Tesla (direct-to-customer) have automated almost the entire customer interface, resulting in a dramatically lift in customer satisfaction. At the same time, agile upstarts such as domestic solar installers and HubSpot (in the SMB CRM space) focus their sales teams exclusively on growth.

A fundamental rethink is required.

Let’s begin by recognizing the one thing a salesperson does better than anyone else in the organization: persuasion. Not relationship management. Not account administration. Not quote generation. Persuasion—the rare ability to convince a prospect or customer to change their behaviors: switch suppliers or adopt a new set of internal practices.

The salesperson’s role should be designed around a recognition of this special (and valuable) skill.

Salespeople should sell

Salespeople should not manage accounts. The optimal customer interface should be engineered into the organization itself. If the organization has major accounts—with special requirements—create an Account Manager role within Operations, not Sales.

Salespeople should not design solutions and write proposals. It’s true that many technical salespeople can do a pretty good job of impersonating engineers. But it’s also true that if you build a pre-order group within engineering, this group can design superior solutions and generate more compelling proposals in a fraction of the lead time.

Salespeople should not prospect. Today, it’s almost impossible for salespeople to start conversations with cold prospects. The marketing department needs to either generate inbound inquiries or furnish salespeople with propositions that are so compelling that prospects are keen to engage. 

Salespeople should sell. That is, they should persuade. Salespeople should spend close to 100% of their time convincing potential and existing customers to change their behaviors. In other words, salespeople should continue conversations that have been initiated by the marketing department and convince their audiences to either commence or expand their commercial relationships.

Salespeople have significant value to add to the modern organization. But this value cannot be unlocked while they are autonomous, commissioned agents. Salespeople need to be paid their market value and integrated properly into the organization. And this means that both Operations and Marketing must also be prepared to rethink their responsibilities.

This will be an uncomfortable conversation. But better now than later!