Dearth of a salesman?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0545817/ "You're a tiger! Grrrr!"

That was my favourite line from Dearth of a Salesman, a programme in Steve Coogan's Coogan's Run comedy series. He played IT salesman Gareth Cheeseman, a greasy, awkward little bag of anxieties, attending a sales conference and trying to further his tin-pushing career. It was a stereotypical portrayal of IT salespeople, of course. In reality, they're a knowledgeable bunch, with good interpersonal skills, well-versed in the art of understanding what customers need. But the biggest challenge facing IT salespeople today - and the industry trend that would leave a real-life, witless Gareth Cheeseman behind - is that customer needs are changing, dramatically.

Managed services is the cause of it all. With everything being offered as a service, the patterns of IT usage are changing. In Cheeseman's time (Coogan made the programme in 1995), IT salespeople sold hardware, and the software to run on that hardware. But as managed services take off, commentators believe that hardware sales to conventional customers will decline, even as it is bought in increasing quantities by third party service provides. Instead, IT departments will eventually buy managed services that they resell to their internal customers. 

There will be iterative steps along this road, of course. Private clouds will create a class of managed services designed to run inside organizations, still administered by IT departments, using their own hardware. But a trusted cadre of sysadmins and business analysts are telling me that this will effectively be replaced by public clouds over time as IT departments simply turn more of their equipment off altogether. 

What happens to the IT salesperson in this scenario? 

Firstly, they will be selling to different people. Expect them to deal more directly with line of business managers in customer organisations, who have wrested budget away from IT to make their own purchases. 

Secondly, commissions will change, because instead of selling servers and software licenses that require significant up-front capital investment, salespeople will be hawking contracts in which customer subscribe to online services for set periods of time. Customers will often pay for these services in smaller, more regular amounts, chalking them up as operational expenditure, which means that compensation packages for salespeople may change. 

Perhaps over time, though, the biggest challenge facing IT salespeople is that they may not be needed at all. Don't get me wrong - there will still be some tigers out there, roaming around, clinching large, intricate corporate contracts. But if line of business managers end up buying a lot of their functionality online by simply  purchasing a number of seats for an online service from a web site, that leaves the sales force out of a job - or at least selling to a far smaller number of specialist data centre operators. Are you exploring your options?