New tech spells death of the salesman

Hill and Markes, a 112-year-old US janitorial and food service supplier, is as old school as old school gets. Several of its field salespeople have visited customers for 35 years, and until December 2016 its rudimentary e-commerce site lacked even photos of many of its products.

These days, though, the New York state company and its 50-person sales team are forging deeper into online retailing and looking to use more e-commerce-aided sales. The automation wave that has displaced so many workers in manufacturing and data entry is hitting the nation’s sales force, particularly among “business-to-business” salespeople who sell to commercial customers.

“At some point, when the client falls in love with the web portal and the company starts using algorithms to cross-sell and up-sell, pretty soon that salesperson is not doing much,” says Andy Hoar, who runs Chicago consulting firm Paradigm B2B.

He predicts that as many as 1 million US b-to-b salespeople could be cut by 2020.

Big distribution companies are trimming their field sales and showroom staffs and dedicating those who remain to their biggest customers. Smaller clients speak with telephone salespeople and digital marketers.

There is a greater willingness among purchasing managers to buy even expensive items online, and new digital analytics tools make it easier to target them.

Particularly at risk are salespeople who essentially are order-takers. Big distributors are putting their field salespeople on only the top 10 per cent of their customers, who account for 70 per cent or more of their sales and need the most attention, says Jonathan Bein of Colorado-based Real Results Marketing.

Restaurant supply giant US Foods had 4000 salespeople visiting independent restaurants in 2013, but has since invested heavily in e-commerce and now has about 2700 salespeople.

W.W. Grainger, an industrial and commercial distributor with US$10 billion in annual sales, has cut its local store count to 251 from 390 five years ago, in part because of a shift to e-commerce. Meanwhile, it reassigned some of its roughly 3000-person sales staff to create 400 inside sellers, says spokesman Joe Micucci. “We didn’t necessarily have to have boots on the ground,” he says.