Ken Krogue

The Harvard Business Review says our customers don’t want to talk to us.

While a sobering thought, I’m also wondering if this doesn’t in part explain the move to “cloud computing” and SaaS over the last ten years.

SaaS takes away some of the most frustrating customer “touch points” of software—maintaining hardware compatibility, the frequent need for updates/patches, as well as having to completely relearn a new interface for every application. Web apps use concepts we’re already familiar with—clicks, links, embedded content—and puts it in front of the user.

Though the occasional unreliability of Internet service can be a problem, to me SaaS represents a trend in this idea that “self-service” often trumps “customer interaction.”

Another quick point:

We’ve been saying it for a while now, but it’s nice to see someone else is taking up the mantra:

Selling Power recently posted an outstanding article describing what we’ve known was coming for sales teams—that technology is going to replace some jobs, and only the most qualified sales reps that are willing to adapt are going to survive.

Inside sales is replacing “outside” sales because it’s faster, more cost effective, and provides more opportunities to leverage the power of technology to improve performance.

Inside sales is more scalable, and much easier to implement across locations/divisions.