Forrester Research’s well-known report “Death of a (B2B) Salesman”, by VP and Senior Analyst Andy Hoar, projected that around 1 million sales professionals — roughly 22% of B2B sales agents in the United States — would lose their jobs to self-serve digital buying. The forces behind that decline have only intensified since, and they apply equally to the rest of the world.
Why?
B2B buyers prefer online facilities to educate themselves, research, and buy relatively easily-defined products and services. Most of the lost jobs, Hoar said, are among reps involved in basic order processing. Reps who offer higher-end help — guiding buyers in large corporations through complex products and services — fare far better. “Order takers are the ones in trouble,” he says. “It all comes down to value in the ordering process — whether sales reps add value or not.”
Why do buyers self-serve? Because it’s quicker, easier and more efficient for them.
The power shift from seller to buyer
Disruptive technologies changed the game. The power has shifted from seller to buyer, and there is often no need or desire for a salesperson to be involved in a purchase at all. B2B buyers are now typically 60% or more through a purchase before they contact any sellers.
The buyer is more than half-way through the process before the seller even gains access — and arrives focused on price, not value.
We interpret this not only as a dramatic reduction in the selling cycle time from the salesperson’s point of view, but as a fundamental access problem. The big issues for sellers become:
- Little time or opportunity to manage the sale.
- Inability to influence the decision criteria.
- Risk that the buyer is focused on price rather than value.
Buyers now have most of the information that sellers used to provide. The salesperson’s old ‘information leverage’ has gone.
Or has it?
The seller who survives and thrives is the one who adds value the website cannot: creating needs the buyer hadn’t fully recognised, shaping the decision criteria around genuine differentiators, and guiding a complex decision the buyer can’t safely make alone. That is precisely what strong qualification and Commitment Based Selling equip a seller to do — to take back control and rebalance the power shift.
Doing this consistently, on every deal, against buyers who are already half-way down their own path, is the hard part. SCOTSMAN® AI is built for exactly that: running the qualification and planning continuously, surfacing where you can add value and influence criteria, and naming the commitments that pull the buyer back into a real conversation — so your sellers stay firmly on the right side of the line.
