This morning at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder of Selling Power magazine, pronounced the death of transactional selling. He said that in the next few years, millions of transactional sales reps need to learn consultative selling or get a new job. Order takers who have not already been replaced by technology will be soon.
This has a couple of interesting implications for pricing.
First, sales reps will have to get better at pricing. They will own the creation of value in the customer relationship. If they don’t also effectively own the value capture side of the equation, their companies will be in big trouble. (A lot of them won’t make it through 2009 unless they turn their act around in a hurry.)
Second, marketers are will have to get better at pricing, too. Some of you will say, wait, marketing already owns pricing. In some cases, this is true, but in many cases, marketing only owns list pricing. The “real” pricing takes place in negotiations with the customer. Marketing will have to get more involved in the price companies actually have to pay.