In the manufacturing sector, you’ll often hear managers and consultants talk about 4IR or Industry 4.0: the idea that there have been four major industrial revolutions. Each has radically changed the way manufacturing works, and each created big winners and big losers.
Sales has also gone through four revolutions; the big difference is you rarely hear people talking about them. That’s a problem: just like each industrial revolution created big winners and big losers, so has every one of the sales revolutions.
Revenue teams that try to force Sales 3.0 tactics on buyers who don’t want them will end up shut out of more and more buying opportunities until they’re all competing for a tiny, low-value piece of the pie with other has-beens. It’s time to ditch your sales playbook and join the revolution, or get left behind.
The Sales 4.0 Revolution
For most of history, “sales” was bringing your goods to market. Then came the first industrial revolution and suddenly someone needed to sell all the goods you were producing to buyers and distributors. This was Sales 1.0: Sales happened in person, you were limited to how far you could get in a reasonable amount of time, and a lot of selling still happened CEO to CEO.
Then Bell invented the telephone, organization complexity grew, and everything changed. You saw the beginnings of real sales teams, and had the ability to sell anywhere in the country with a phone call. It was still mostly in person, but Sales 2.0 saw the world shrinking.
Toward the end of the last century, the information age was exploding and sales changed once again. Sales 3.0 was powered by computers, the internet, and a world of global connections. Large sales teams could meet buyers from the other side of the Earth on Zoom, send over a PDF for signature, and close by quitting time. But it was still mostly the same dynamic — sellers reaching out to buyers.
We are here: Sales 4.0. Millennials and Gen Z grew up researching sneakers and bands and restaurants online; they’re bringing those habits to work. Buyers are digital-first, and they’re “doing buying” long before you even know who they are. They spend 45% of the buying cycle performing independent research. Most (75%) don’t want to talk to a rep, and a growing number (33%) don’t want any sales interactions at all. Welcome to the world of buyer-led sales; welcome to Sales 4.0.
You Never See Sales-Free Buyers Coming
According to a report from AI sales platform 6Sense, by the time B2B buyers actually engage with sellers they’re already 70% of the way through their buying cycle. Gartner backs this up, finding that only 17% of the buying cycle actually involves meeting suppliers. If you’re running the old sales playbook, there’s a chance you’ll never see these buyers; you won’t even know they’re out there.
What was once seen as a generational divide is now a lot more blurry as new buying habits percolate and spread throughout organizations. Winning these buyers over will take a lot more than a “digital transformation.” Meeting new buyers where they are will require a “buyer-led transformation”: throwing out your existing sales playbook and building a whole new one around buyers, not products.
Understanding how to not just spot these new buyers, but to actively engage them without ever once speaking to them is at the core of the Sales 4.0 challenge. Doing so will require new strategies, new tactics, and an entirely new approach to sales.
Laying Breadcrumbs
So how do sales teams find and guide buyers when buyers don’t want to be found? By laying down a trail of breadcrumbs so enticing that buyers can’t help but to follow. Think that scene in ET with the Reese’s Pieces. Sellers have to get into their buyers’ heads, understand what they need when, and (gently) help them find it on their own without becoming a roadblock or choke point for information. Gatekeeping is out; giving buyers the tools to build their own guided sales journeys is in.
This starts with figuring out exactly who your buyers are, where they are in their buying process, and what they need to get to the next step to make a confident decision. Intent signals, always an important piece, are now critical. The custom experiences buyers expect are only possible if you have a solid understanding of what exactly they’re looking for so you can give it to them. Where intent signals have changed is that they are now much more diffuse and nebulous, making the work of identifying and valuing them more difficult.
Buyer intent is largely informed by buyer profile: are they an end user? An executive? Budgeting? Legacy sales plays often fail here because they rely on best guesses and human intelligence rather than hard data. In doing so, they miss or fail to identify large chunks of the buying group — as many as half, according to research from 6sense. Tools like interactive video demos with demolytics help to fill in the blanks.
These tools let buyers identify themselves to you, providing sellers with a more comprehensive picture of the buying group as well as the data needed to implement more advanced buyer identification on websites and other materials. And unlike legacy approaches, these tools largely eliminate the seller as a gatekeeper, giving modern buyers the experience they’re looking for.
The biggest problem with Sales 3.0 is it’s one sales team playing out of one sales playbook for a limited number of buyer types. Sales 4.0 flips the script: the sales team is now the revenue team, there’s no more sales playbook, and every sale is tailored for an audience of one. Making that transition requires you to know your buyers and diversify your outreach channels (including inbound outreach!) to meet buyers where they are.
Start Making Sense
Traditionally, one of the most powerful plays in the sales playbook was connecting with a buyer early enough that you could help shape their requirements. In being able to do so, good sales reps could influence the buyer’s final specifications to make your solution the best fit. That’s harder to do in an environment where 78% of buyers have their requirements finalized before their first contact with a sales rep.
Yet, even though buyers increasingly want a sales-free buying process, 60% of B2B SaaS buyers experience regret about their purchase decision. The biggest factors for this dissatisfaction include challenges with the purchase process, buying team dynamics, and unmet expectations. These factors all point to the same problem (and opportunity for sales teams) — buying B2B SaaS products is hard, and buyers often feel overwhelmed and confused by available choices.
The single biggest value sellers can provide is helping buyers make sense of their needs and options. And they have to do it long before the buyer makes contact. Sellers have to use the information they’ve gathered on buyer intent and buying group membership to figure out what support to provide when, and how, and that support will need to include getting the entire buyer group aligned around core requirements.
The modern, Sales 4.0 revenue team needs to be part psychic, part engineer, part teacher, part mediator, and mostly invisible to the buyer. And it needs to be a team — one that includes not just BDRs and field reps, but also sales engineers, marketers, and product and customer success teams. Every member of this integrated team needs to be laser focused on identifying individual buyers and helping them understand what they really need, what software fits their criteria, and how they can come together with their buying team to find something that fills all their requirements.
Rewriting the Playbook
If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is. Where Sales 3.0 was all about automating and streamlining processes to let sales reps focus on selling one-to-one in a more efficient way, Sales 4.0 is about turning one-to-one into one-to-many-ones. Or even none-to-one, for teams that successfully integrate advanced tools and technologies like demo automation and AI into their revenue stack.
In either case, the success or failure of your revenue team will be determined based on how quickly you can ditch the sales playbook you used; and how quickly you can write a new one that gives buyers individualized, interactive, self-serve tools that let them design their own buying journey without losing your guidance.
Remember, most companies will never know that buyers are considering them. Certainly not until it’s too late. And if that doesn’t change, those companies probably won’t be around to see Sales 5.0 when it happens.
