Why is sales such a dirty word and why do we dread it? It’s probably from years of being on the receiving end of pushy salespeople, interrupt-driven sales, and supply-side pitches. But, this is old sales. And it’s no longer how people want to be sold. Demand Generation is (modern) sales.

• Old sales was all about exploiting the asymmetry of information between buyer and seller. In almost every market today, that asymmetry of information has lessened considerably or completely disappeared. You should expect your customers to know as much or more than you especially when you first enter the market.
• Old sales was all about out-pitching your competition. Modern sales is about out-teaching your competition. Speed of learning is the new unfair advantage. And teaching is the best way to learn. So out-teach to out-learn.
• Old sales was about squeezing people through a funnel. It was a numbers game where you tried to brute-force more conversion at every step of the funnel — even at the expense of downstream conversions. Modern sales is about thinking of sales as part of an interconnected system versus a funnel. You don’t squeeze customers through but rather strive to always guide customers towards value creation. The rest takes care of itself.
• Old sales was playing the short game. It just about customer acquisition. Modern sales is playing the long game. It’s about aligning acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral with the goal of creating more happy customers (aka throughput / traction).
• Old sales was about selling an already built product. Modern sales is about first deeply understanding the wants and needs of customers. Then designing a product to deliver on that. Modern sales is product development.
• Old sales was something done by people with sales in their titles. Modern sales is everyone’s job.

Modern sales isn’t sales anymore, its demand generation.

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