Evolution of Sales Conversations
There are as many ways to describe “Sales Eras” as there are sales people. A quick search will reveal sales stages and methods like manipulative versus consultative, push versus pull, barrier selling, relationship selling, transactional selling and much more.
In my work I keep a focus on selling as being all about buying, and as such my interest is in the evolution of how we understand and work with buyers. I often hark back to a 2012 article in the Harvard Business Review about the end of Solution Sales.
Sales Conversations are what interest me the most in a sales context. We can see how this has evolved over the last few generations in three broad categories:
- Advertising
- Solution Selling
- Problem Solving.
See the Infographic below for more details.
