Purchaser says no.
With companies being forced to watch their spend a lot more I don't see much future in relation-based sales.
AI is not going to give a fuck about it, so I think it will die in BtB.
This is definitely affecting some areas, but I would say consulting/planning and such will be the most resistant so long as people want/need human input.
In my world, you're dead on right. This movement was starting around 2017-2018. It used to be that we would sell to the security teams at companies, they would then craft up their requests for budgets and whatnot based on the solutions they wanted to buy from us. There was sometimes a require for X number of vendor offerings and such, but that could be worked around because the decision makers were the technical people/security leads and they could craft their requirements to meet the solution they wanted.
Purchasing departments hated that we would have personal relationships with the executives and technical influencers, as they're compensated often by how good a discount they can get. In the older days it would be that we would have a "bake off" with other technologies, whoever won that the security team would take to executives to get purchased. Purchasing departments (as we say "The rise of the VMO" , Vendor Management Office) then told them to stop telling any vendor that they had technically won because they wanted to leverage of saying "Oh, you won't go to an 85% discount? I can hang up this phone and promise you vendor XYZ will..."
The way we would build these relationships was the old school way, we took teams, managers, and executives to lunches to talk and build the relationship. Folks would play Golf (or drink at Top Golf), or go to the range, or go to marketing events to socialize with the vendors/resellers. To be honest in my current position I consider one of the advantages is that I'm able to make and establish personal relationships with all the CISOs in my territory. Because I know if I move to another company they'll be a lot more likely to take my call and hear me out about what I'm selling because they remember I helped them out when I was with the employer I'm at now. Interviewing in my industry often includes a discussion about "who do you have in your rolodex", meaning who can you call and get meetings to sell stuff.
Then covid hit, and nobody got to do ANY in person events/lunches/golf/anything. Purchasing departments seized on this opportunity to make it company policy not to do these things at all going forward. Some places went along with this.
Now, with all my customers it's gotten to the point that we win the technical battle, then have to win a procurement battle. But what's happening is that now instead of just building the relationship with the technical decision makers and controllers of budget, we're also making relationship with the purchasing department heads. And just like that we're kinda back to where we were. We just now know the things we do to ingratiate ourselves to VMO's, VP's or procurement, etc. Amazing how going through one or two procurement cycles with a VMO and suddenly you know how they prefer things, you know how to help them get their job done faster, you know to hold off on a certain amount of discounting so you can make them look good by saying "We got VendorX to knock an additional 5% off that multi-million dollar purchase!"
I've had heads of purchasing at some companies I support even go do far as to text us on the side and say "Look, Vendor Y is coming in at $X. Beat that price and they go away." and not necessarily texting Vendor Y and telling them anything... Because of relationships.
Also, we're seeing some companies that decided to do the "decision purely by bean counting" start to see those decisions backfire on them when they end up with a technically deficient solution because some other vendor managed to answer the RFP right, and low ball the price. Which is causing some push back to "we need to be able to decide the right solution, THEN hammer out pricing".
Haus
is in IT sales like me, but it thought it would be interesting to see who else stresses about quotas every quarter. I have only worked for pretty large corporations and would love to hear more about smaller/family owned businesses.
