Product lifecycles are getting shorter, sales cycles are getting longer, there are more competitors entering the market, and buyers are doing most of their research online before they even call you. When you finally get the meeting, buyers only want your best price.
Despite all of this, your manager keeps asking for more - more calls, more meetings, faster, faster, faster!
You're stuck between a rock and a hard place - a more challenging sales environment than ever before on one side, and ever-increasing quotas and expectations on the other.
How will you respond? Wait and see how it all unfolds? Or fight for your career and your livelihood?
In The Future of the Sales Profession, sales leader Graham Hawkins shares the cold, hard truths about the new realities facing the sales profession, and how you can protect and enhance your career.
Graham writes in an easy to read style. The book is well research and back up by both industry research and case studies. The reader is taken through a journey, the history of selling, why sales has and will continue to evolve and then in the third section Graham explains how you can make a change to meet the needs of the modern buyer. For me this third section gave me a step by step process of what I need to do to sell in the modern world. From my social media profile to the way I present myself to the modern buyer. If you are in sales and see a change is needed then this is worth a read.
I read this in order to try to understand what is necessary of a B2B sales person today. This definitely helped give me an idea of what the future of sales could look like. This book is structured more as a career planning guide for a sales person, rather than a sales playbook for a B2B company.