There was a time when a sales guy had to spend eighty percent of his time on field and twenty percent of his time in the office completing dreaded admin chores. But all that is changing and how!
So what is actually a sales job? Not so long ago, it involved cold calling your target market to generate leads and through them revenue numbers. While this Cowboy attitude looks very active on paper, was/is this actually the right way to go?
The internet has changed the manner in which organisations approach the marketplace. New fangled terms such as Supply Chains and Data have entered the public consciousness. But what are these? The fact is that Supply Chains…the movement of product, people, cash… have always existed. Data has always existed too…it’s the just manner in which we consume it has changed. A little explanation on this.
When Moses had the ten commandments on a stone slab…this was data! The same goes for the Rosetta Stone. The evolution of consuming data has changed slowly but surely over the milenia…manuscripts…paper ( aha! Books !! )….LPs…cassette tapes….CD’s…DVD’s…and then the new age OTT’s and of course Social Media. But what accelerated this glacial rate of change to that of rushing river rapids? One word technology.
As Moore’s Law took root and our computing power kept doubling every eighteen to twenty four months ( it’s even quicker now ), our ability to consume increasing amounts of data kept pace abreast…of course our ability to manage data in units we never heard of before has only abetted this progression. In the old days it was bytes..then MB…later GB & TB…progressed to petabytes…and now Exabytes( EB )! After Exabyte…what next? Zettabyte (ZB)…and so the progression continues….
But what has this progression got to do with a Sales Job? Well the typical old style sales job (remember the travelling salesman?) is all but extinct. This has now bifurcated into Business Development and the Data Scientist.
Business Development now uses multiple tools ( most of them based on Big Data in addition to OLAP & OLTP ) to go into the marketplace in a targeted manner and Evangelize your organization’s product ( evnagelize not educate ) thereby creating a need where none existed. But what is Big Data? It’s the offline translation of Human Behavior in the online space…
Data Science is still in it’s infancy, but the changes have been startling and any job search on Linkedin will automatically show you the demand for jobs in this sphere of work.
Having said that there is still no substitute for the good old Human Brain that understands this holistic picture…read Domain Experience….
Young entrants into the Commercial Marketplace will do well to understand this right off the bat…