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#### Yes. And.

#### Yes. And. No. Atlassian built a software empire without a single salesperson. Slack didn’t have a CMO to speak of at first, let alone a sales person. Qwilr got to X customers without any direct selling. Imagine you went to a car dealership. Those sleazy used cars ones where you’re always on your toes, trying to sniff out the sales guy. The same sales guy who can smell your blood from over a mile away. The same sales guy who doesn’t know when to stop. The same sales guy who just won’t stop selling. You get the point. Now imagine you went to the same car dealership. Instead this time there’s something different. No one is talking to you and trying to push you into buying anything. The sales guy has a huge smile on his face. Greets you at the door, sits you down at his desk. Then the unthinkable happens — he asks you what kind of car you are looking for. Not only that, he actually lets you know that the Escalade you’ve had your eye on is probably overkill and you’re better off with something more economical. You walk away smiling, feeling smarter and without a hole in your pocket. Sales has been around ever since there’s been goods to sell. We used to barter, trade and sell since we discovered fire and built the first civilization. But it wasn’t always a dirty word. Modern sales as we know it started with Oracle, who implemented the sales development strategy in the 1980's; prospecting customers, discovering their needs and problems, proposing a solution, qualifying the prospects based on certain criteria like BANT (Budget Authorization Need Timeline) and finally the all important closing . It hasn’t changed much since then. Hire some folk whose only job is to work a list and call as many people as possible and watch the deals trickle in. But that doesn’t work anymore. Personally I almost never don’t pick up the phone if it’s someone I don’t know. For the most part I know what I need and it’s not an Escalade, even though I might want one. Traditionally salespeople would knock on the proverbial door. Once you let them in, they would explain or convince you that you have a problem. Once you were convinced you have that problem and you desperately need someone or something to solve it, they would flick their wrists to present you with the perfect solution. That’s how they made their money and that’s how the world worked. That’s all fine and dandy. There were only a limited number of large vendors and everyone specialized specific problems and offered solutions like SAP, Oracle, NCR & Siebel. Sales pipelines were built of phone lists and cheques were signed in the boardroom. It worked this way because the consumer or prospect only had a limited number of options and a limited information flow. What the sales guy knew, you did not. He or she had special industry insider knowledge, experience and ‘had seen it before’ and knew exactly what the solution was. Once the cheque was signed, the implementation team would move into your office to implement whatever massive software system you bought. Months and months would be blocked off just for implementation, afterwards was training and some services. You were on your own for the most part. It was a transactional relationship. All said and done, if you weren’t happy with what you had, too bad. You signed a 10 year contract. The internet and the browser changed that. Many would talk about how the internet changed everything. But the fundamental tool that lets us ‘use’ the internet is the browser and that in-itself is true innovation. Before the browser, the internet was for geeks and nerds but the browser helped it cross the chasm into the mainstream market. The humble browser also started new software career paths, languages, frameworks and of course SaaS or delivering software on demand in your browser. No server administration or additional overhead. I was at large enterprise in the FMCG industry during a SAP implementation. The place was swarming with consultants and implementation specialists, the meetings were endless and the timeline was, well unknown. There were many failed attempts before that. Not to mention the enormous costs, on site servers, legacy processes and code that needed to be migrated over. Switch over to the flip side; I’ve worked with three companies to implement Salesforce, Hubspot and Pardot. The difference in scale aside, there was no consultants swarming at the office, no on site servers and no configurations, local software or endless meetings. It was a simple process. API’s and existing integration libraries made it easy to make the entire stack talk to each other. The fundamental way that software is bought, sold, marketed and implemented has changed. It’s time software sales changes with it. It is. It’s becoming customer success. For the most part. The word Customer Success first appeared in written form somewhere in 1994. Perhaps one of the earliest books about it is Delighting Customers: How to build a customer-driven organization “http://www.amazon.ca/Delighting-Customers-build-customer-driven-organization/dp/0412610108/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443659357&sr=1-1&keywords=9780412610103" <iframe name=”ngram_chart” src=”https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=customer+success&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1990&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ccustomer%20success%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bcustomer%20success%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BCustomer%20Success%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BCustomer%20success%3B%2Cc0" width=900 height=500 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no></iframe> Lets take a step back and examine what customer success is and isn’t. I’ve been involved in Customer Success since 2011 and the first question I get is ‘Isn’t it just a fancy name for customer support?’ — no. It’s actually completely different models. If customer support is putting out fires as they happen, customer success is being strategic and keeping the flame away from the gasoline. Customer Success if a holistic strategic discipline to ensure your customers are getting the desired output or outcome from the product. It helps accelerate adoption within the customer organization, looks at key health metrics like usage, adoption, churn and also identify opportunities for upsell/cross sell if the customer needs evolve. Customer Success revolves around a number of things including Advocacy, Renewals, Onboarding (emails and with a human) with the desired outcome being the customer and the organization has a positive outcome from all the interactions. In short — you are making their life easier. Here’s what the process used to look like before. <img src=”https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1VZB4q9C0Mq2uN1nnPwqUlqZ_IdVilfcUh_C4YavdXyA/pub?w=668&amp;h=333"> Here’s what the process looks like now. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2OuRmOl7162c2RQa2Yyb2dTcVU/view?usp=sharing For the most part? Yes. As the internet levelled the playing field and evolved sales into more of a customer success model. The internet and browser stack lowered the barrier to entry. It’s never been easier to start a company. As the barriers to start a business, especially software businesses got lowered so did the price point of most software being sold to serve these startups. As most businesses started to move to the internet, the need for unbloated software became apparent. Think Bitbucket or Github. MailChimp, SendGrid or Streak. Think Qwilr or Google Docs. These small businesses and startups don’t need massive on premise systems or huge databases. Most are small agile companies that need something quick, easy to manage and easy to use. They don’t have an IT department or an RFP process. The first thing they would do is type their problem into a search engine and start looking around for what’s out there. Most B2B businesses are embracing consumer marketing techniques and focused more on education the customer on best practices, the area of their business domain and in general making life easier to their customers. Gone are perhaps the days of pouncing on the phone and calling someone right when they first land on your site. This is part of [](http://)the bigger trend of consumerization on IT in enterprise but also the rise of startups and small businesses that don’t rely on big heavy data systems. The role of the decision maker gets immensely diminished in these cases as the end user becomes the decision maker and eventually the loudest and most important evangelist in the company. But the rift is the adoption. Yes IT and B2B is looking more and more like consumer space without the lack of complex and complicated systems, but these solutions are not simplistic as an iphone app. The salesperson is now more of a coach and cheerleader than he is a closer. So where does that leave us if you have a solution based sales model but no idea how to transition into a insight based sales model focused on success than closing? Or maybe none of the above really makes any sense. First let’s redefine the problem in a more succinct way. The way goods and service have traditional been sold is focused on the solution, not the customer’s problem. An excellent HBR essay calls this Solution Selling — ask open ended questions to surface the realization within the customer organization that they have a need for the solution. Then establish the hook with your proposed solution to work through the purchasing process. At the epicenter of this model was the information unbalance between the vendor and the customer and the transactional business model. The process was discrete. The new sales process assumes a information balance. The vendor and the customer both have equal amounts of information about the problem and the available solutions. The business model has evolved from transactional to continuum of interactions and engagements. The customer is aware of the problems and actively looking for solutions. Sales is not about solution selling but insight selling — giving the customer further insights into the problem and laying out possible solutions, including but not limited to just yours. The burden of choice has shifted. This shift has made shifted the business paradigm. We hear of the new buzz words like Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Customer Success, Insight Selling or Death to Sales! Before jumping ahead — sales is not dead. It’s still vital and crucial to the company. People are social and they like reaffirmations that they’re doing the right thing. The role of sales has evolved and businesses needs to evolve their mental models. *DYLAN’S THOUGHTS: The direction of the article is interesting — though I think, from a purely thought space perspective, maybe we need to discuss how this new “new sales = customer success model” works? i.e. How cloud-based tools like X,Y & Qwilr can help embody and achieve this notion of customer success? Or how the model of multi-touch sales hasn’t changed, its just that those interactions have become (as you say) less about grinding sales, and more about championing and cheering. (Which is a nice segway into why the material you use to communicate that good stuff needs to be top quality). Anyway, I assume this is where the latter half of the article was going anyways! Perhaps it’s worth discussing how the new model of business is being serviced by a new breed of business tools, allowing for an evolution of the traditional sales model, to something that is feels tailored and targeted to the lead — but is actually partly automated, and vastly more efficient. DATA: I think it would be cool to backup some of the statements about change and transition in the industry with some data. i.e. how composition of workforce in software sales has changed perhaps? not sure if that data is available? Again not sure what the latter half of the article is going to look like, but its worth noting, at the high-level: I’d prefer to steer away from the idea of “zero-touch” sales as the new model of business. If the conclusion of the article is that for the new breed of business, content marketing, website and product on-boarding and user experience can replace traditional “sales” mechanisms — that might be a little antithetical to the Qwilr market :) i.e. The Qwilr customer base, at least those we’re targeting at the moment for revenue purposes, are sales driven organisations. Not necessarily hard sell organisations, but definitely producing proposals + docs etc. to close deals. *