... They were the person everyone used to call -
I built my first career on knowing things my customers could not easily find out.
That sounds like an advantage I engineered. It was just the era. Marketing existed to create awareness, because customers genuinely did not know our offering existed and had no practical way to discover it. Leads came in and went to sales. From that point forward the rep owned the whole thing: explaining how the product worked, helping the customer decide what to specify, answering the technical question or finding the person who could.
The rep was the whole channel.
So what made someone good at the job was what they carried in their head. Application knowledge, failure modes, and who to call at the plant when a spec went sideways. I was the person people called, and being that person was the whole of my value. Nobody had to explain the model to me, because there was no other model.
The Harder Half
Direct interaction with a supplier now accounts for roughly seventeen percent of a B2B buying process.
Read that as a resource number and it is merely uncomfortable. Read it as an identity number and it lands somewhere else. If a rep is present for seventeen percent of the decision, then whatever a rep is worth, it cannot mostly be the information they carry. The customer got the rest somewhere else, and they got it before the first conversation.
In 2022, a survey of sales leaders found eighty-five percent expected solution selling to be a core sales capability, built on strong product knowledge and solution design. I think they were right, and I would have said the same thing. But read the phrase carefully. A core capability is the entry fee. It qualifies you to be in the conversation, and it has never been the thing that wins it.
We increasingly mismeasured this job over the last twenty years, because the work itself moved.
When a purchase involved five or six people who sat near each other and had worked together for years, a champion could carry the internal argument alone. That is an ordinary amount of persuading among colleagues. A typical B2B purchase now involves just over eleven people, most of whom have never met each other, and purchase likelihood falls from eighty percent to thirty percent as a group grows from one person to six. At that size the internal argument stops being persuasion and becomes an organizational project, run with no plan and no authority, by someone who already has a day job.
That work did not disappear; it got harder.
Look at what we are actually asking of an internal champion. Make our argument, in rooms we will never enter, to people whose incentives we have not studied, with none of our fluency. Absorb the personal risk if it goes badly, and collect none of the credit if it goes well. Nobody in that position is irrational for going quiet. A champion who decides this purchase is not worth their credibility is making a sound judgment about their own situation, and that judgment is what most stalled deals actually consist of.
Which is why the arrival of AI in the commercial function reads to me as a job promotion. What AI absorbs first is information transfer, and information transfer was always the half of the job most easily replaced. What is left is the part that got harder while we were busy scoring the part that got easier.
I would go a step further, though I hold this loosely. If the information half is going, the division of labor between marketing and sales probably stops describing the work. Marketing starts looking less like creating awareness and more like designing the path a buying group travels, while the rep's job concentrates where the stakes are highest and the trust has to be real. Whether firms reorganize that way is not something I would predict. That the old split has stopped being accurate seems clear enough.
Actioning the Insight
Stop treating "let me take this internally" as progress. It is the most dangerous sentence in a good meeting. What it means is that our argument will now be made by the person with the least fluency in it and the most to lose from making it. Ask to be in the room. When that is genuinely impossible, do not end the meeting until you know who will be in it, what each of them is measured on, and what your champion is actually going to say when the first objection lands.
Carry the internal campaign instead of supplying it. Handing a champion better material still leaves them doing the hard part alone. Meet the skeptical function directly rather than routing everything through one person. Put your name on the recommendation so it is not their judgment standing by itself. Work out the order of the internal conversations, because the group has no order of operations and the person least connected to the decision usually gets pulled in last, when reversing anything is expensive.
Then test the premise on your own pipeline. Take the last several deals that stalled and sort them into two piles: the ones where the customer did not know enough, and the ones where the customer could not get aligned. If the second pile is bigger, more information was never the answer, and the capability worth building is not the one on the 2022 list.
The reps I would bet on now are the ones a customer trusts to help eleven people decide something difficult. That is harder than knowing the answer, and it is worth a great deal more.
Until next week,
Kendall -
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