death of the salesman?

the famous playwright Arthur Miller wrote a

play called the ‘Death Of The Salesman’, that became famous in the fifties and

the sixties. Perhaps, it was too early for pronouncing such a verdict to the ubiquitous

salesmen, but it is now fast becoming a reality, with web sales increasing daily for many

companies in the US. The role of the salesman is slowly undergoing a change in the new Web

paradigm of doing business.

It all started when a ‘young’ man

and an ‘old’ man started goading Net users to buy commodities through the

Internet. And they made successful businesses of it. William Dell, the youngster with the

bright idea of taking on the might of Compaq and IBM, persuaded buyers to buy his PCs

online. Jim Barksdale, the more wizened and experienced started selling his browser

online, thus also creating a web site with maximum hits and hence earning a huge revenue

from advertisements.

Now you have many companies following the

route created by Dell Computers and Netscape Communications in the US. So much so that a

greater part of the recent profit made by Apple Computer came from web sales. The latest

in the US is buying cars on the Net, with research indicating that 10 percent of the car

buyers in the US saying that they would buy cars online in 1998, compared to 4 percent

last year. In India, this is slowly taking off with some companies taking the initiative

of marketing goods on the Net. Moreover, with the Reserve Bank of India allowing ecommerce

on the Net in the near future, this kind of business holds promise for the country.

The natural question that follows is: what

happens to the salesman? The salesman undergoes a metamorphosis in this era of new medium

of communication. Till now, what he practiced was ‘push’ strategy to sell his

wares. The WWW gives him a tool for ‘pull’-a strategy wherein the customer comes

to him rather than his going to customer.ÿBut here is the catch. First of all, the

salesman can no longer claim to know his customer. With personal interaction gone, the

salesman cannot even see the customer, let alone ‘con’ him or her. Second, the

salesman is faced by finicky customer who is much more knowledgeable than before. With the

Web being a repository of information, the customer is armed with all the data about the

particular product and is probably bargaining with at least four or five dealers. Third,

this information gives the customers a better bargaining power on the Web than otherwise.

For vendors, it is a boon, as they get to

cut distribution costs which amount to 30 percent of the total costs. On the other hand,

the customer is better of with brighter chances of a good bargain. But the guys who take

the hit are the dealer and the salesman. Not only is their geography threatened by other

dealers’ encroachment, but their margins too are getting depleted because of

competition between dealers.

So the question that faces the salesman is:

how is he going to evolve and succeed in the Net generation? Even as he is slowly and

steadily being replaced by the web agent, maybe the salesman finds that there is life

after the Net too. Maybe the Web could end up becoming his biggest ally rather than the

agency which threatens his very existence.