Modern Sales Success - The 5 New Roles of Sales Professionals

Sales professionals are facing new challenges - no matter if they deal directly with consumers or with business customers. Conventional techniques and best practices in many cases no longer lead to the desired results. Partnerships break apart, loyalty depends on new criteria, satisfaction and long-term collaboration are at stake. For true partnerships, sales people have at least 5 new roles they need to be able to take in order to be successful in the future:

• Consultant: Advise your customers to be really successful. Your cooperation is one means of being successful, but not the only option. This requires fairness and new methodological competencies as business developer.
• Project Manager: See yourself as project assistant for success criteria of your partners. Analyze, control, connect, modulate, regulate, implement, and celebrate together, just as it is relevant to make projects successful.
• Business Mediator: Do not avoid conflicts, but facilitate and moderate them with a neutral and fair attitude. The conflict is your actual task and supports the mutual analysis of the requirements and finding solutions integrating shared interests of all parties.
• Entrepreneur: Think efficiently and effectively - focus on outcomes and cost for your partners. Who saves or wins money, time, nerves, and other resources with you, will keep your company.
• Partner: Be human and approachable at eye level. Listen, accept requests, really care about the other, and avoid everything that is hierarchical, compromise-demanding, bargaining, or tactical. Honesty is the best.

Of course, in addition to these new roles, sales experts still need know-how in solution selling, rhetorical skills, empathy, emotional intelligence, the ability to capture complex situations, stress resistance, and a strong internal sales drive. Still, top sales professionals in the long run will excel when they develop the new understanding of true partnership. This means far more than learning courtesy or formulating value propositions. Negotiating hard-ball for modern sales follows a new motto: Empathy with the hard facts and rationality with the soft facts.

A more detailed discussion of these topics in an interview with Dr. Marco Behrmann has been published in the digitalpublishingreport 09/2021 (in German).

For a limited time, you can participate in a study on modern sales and partner understanding. Filing all questions will take 30 minutes. The study (in German) makes participants reflect about their mindset and behaviors in their role and with customers: SalesMotion survey.