---
title: "Goodbye, Salesmen!"
description: "2020 marks the beginning of the digital marketing era, accelerated by the pandemic. As traditional channels and the internet fully integrate, the role of salesmen will be replaced by digital systems, turning them into 'human components' within these systems."
author: "方刚"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2021-03-02"
language: "en"
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---

# Goodbye, Salesmen!

> 2020 marks the beginning of the digital marketing era, accelerated by the pandemic. As traditional channels and the internet fully integrate, the role of salesmen will be replaced by digital systems, turning them into 'human components' within these systems.

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**-01-**
**2020 is the first year of marketing digitalization. Due to the pandemic, marketing digitalization has been accelerated by 6 years.**
Unlike e-commerce and O2O, which have carved out new territories outside traditional commerce, marketing digitalization is the comprehensive integration of traditional enterprises (brand owners, distributors) with the internet.
Marketing digitalization means: **because traditional channels and the internet are fully integrated, the boundary between traditional and internet will disappear. In a short time, there will be no traditional marketing; all enterprises will be internet enterprises.**
**At the same time, it also means that those who draw a clear line with the internet will also disappear.**
Those who integrate with the internet become the drivers of digitalization.
Those who do not integrate with the internet become the ones expelled by digitalization.
Whether active or passive, they will be "human components" in the system.

**-02-**
Salesmen are a unique presence in the Chinese marketing system. So, what is the value and significance of salesmen?
**Channel operation and management. This is the unique value of Chinese salesmen.**
Chinese channels are highly fragmented, with both distributors and terminal stores in a fragmented state. Fragmentation means that sales volume is proportional to the number of customers.
When the number of channel customers reaches a certain level, specialists or organizations are needed to manage them, including product promotion and derivative work. **The value of salesmen lies in connecting customers.**
**Even when connecting customers, different enterprises define it differently.** Some cover the distributor level, while others reach the terminal level more finely. The former is a wholesale or deep-assisted sales model, with fewer but more skilled salesmen; the latter is basically a deep distribution model, with a large number of salesmen, where quantity is justice, and one sales representative manages about 200 terminals.
**Fragmented channels and salesmen form a symbiotic relationship. Salesmen are like "hair on the skin" attached to terminals (channels). If the skin is gone, where will the hair attach?**

**-03-**
If channels no longer need salesmen, it must be because channels have undergone revolutionary changes, and the value of salesmen has disappeared.
**What salesmen are best at are fragmented terminal stores, such as mom-and-pop shops. The earliest channel change that challenged salesmen was the rise of KA (Key Accounts).**
With urbanization, channel chainization has become a trend, and the number of independent mom-and-pop stores has sharply decreased, leaving less room for salesmen to operate. Especially in large city markets, salesmen have lost their skills and their functions have been abolished.
Many enterprises are forced to go downward under the banner of "going to the countryside" to find some garbage sales to fill their stomachs, so the brand's aim gets lower and lower, the channel's gun points more and more downward, and in the end, they have sales but no brand, they enter the village but cannot return to the city...
**The second challenge to salesmen is the internet's deep penetration into offline.**
Not to mention that e-commerce, which accounts for 1/4 of total social retail goods, has nothing to do with salesmen, nor does O2O. B2B has also come, trying to complete a no-salesman model of online ordering and offline delivery, which is deeply favored by urban terminals;
More critically, community group buying has also arrived. The six major factions each lead hundreds of thousands of group leaders, from sweeping the streets to sweeping people, conducting seamless distribution with depth, and without needing street-running salesmen!
**Salesmen are thus conquered, weakened, and expelled!**

**-04-**
**Salesmen will eventually become "human components" trapped in the system!**
In the combination of digital systems and salesmen, does the salesman dominate the digital system, or does the system dominate the salesman?
Will everyone be an analyst, or will all the time and actions of salesmen be analyzed by AI algorithms, eventually becoming salesmen trapped in the system?
**In the past, the standard for an excellent salesman was strong communication skills and high emotional intelligence. In the future, this will not be needed, because the system will tell you the work goals and content for each day and hour.** Salesmen may no longer need to return to the office for morning and evening meetings, no longer need to fill out forms day after day as "form masters," and can even work freely, just completing tasks within the system... but they become "a human component in the system."
With the digitalization process, more and more professions will become components in the system. Professions like express delivery, food delivery, and Didi are all behind systems. They can be without organizations, but they cannot be without systems!
Yes, you read that right. It is indeed "**there is a system, but no organization**".
**In the past, a group of people would form an organization. Organizational capability was an important management capability.**
**Now, a group of people will attach to a platform.** There are so many food delivery riders, but no huge organization has formed.
Didi has so many drivers, but they don't even know each other. Not to mention forming any organization.
**The combination of the internet and people is not traditional organizations picking up internet tools, but forming a new organizational form: platform system + individuals (or unit organizations).**
This is a new organizational form, which might as well be called "**human components**".
**From a human perspective, becoming a human component trapped in the system is a cruel thing, but from an enterprise perspective, using the system to trap people is the way to operate! Enterprises without systems or people detached from systems will be fleeting and have no commercial survival value.**
**Even in the internet age, it is necessary to handle the relationship between automation and humanization well, and balance the contradiction between centralization and decentralization.**
A company that relies too much on automation may lose contact with its customers (and its employees); an organization too far from automation may miss opportunities for innovation and efficiency that technology can achieve to better serve customers. The degrees of automation and humanization, and centralization and decentralization, differ, so the model has no perfect mathematical symmetry.
Marshall McLuhan, the founder of media theory, predicted: marketing has four stages. Initially, in the stage of scarce goods, it is merchant-centric; then competition leads to a product-centric stage; the third stage is the era of surplus, user-centric; the fourth era is machine-centric! The system's composition is half-human, half-machine. Media is an extension of the human body. In the future, humans and machines will undergo a great fusion!
**From machines being extensions of humans to humans being extensions of machines. This is a great reversal.**

**-05-**
**The primary-secondary relationship between humans and machines will gradually shift from human-primary, machine-secondary to machine-primary, human-secondary.**
Whether acknowledged or not, this day will come!
How to reconcile individual excellence and system advancement is a topic of the era.
Every company will be a digital company, with its own systems, including modules for supply, production, finance, marketing, etc. Traditional hierarchical organizations will be replaced by system algorithms and instructions.
**In the era of marketing digitalization, do not emphasize the excellence of individuals and organizations, but think about the advancement of your own system! Excellent individuals in a foolish system are destined to be foolish; foolish individuals in an advanced system will certainly be excellent.**
**Either become a super individual or become a human component.**
As a super individual, you can be a super influencer with tens of millions of fans, being a platform yourself.
As a human component, you are a component striving for tasks within the system! Everyone is being "calculated" by AI algorithms.

**-06-**
**Marketing is a digital profession! If marketing is divided into two halves, the first half emphasizes soft elements like creativity and emotional intelligence; in the second half, marketing becomes a digital game, where all work elements can be digitally recorded, expressed, and traced, and can be intelligently learned and improved.**
**The saying "marketing is art" will gradually be replaced by marketing technology, including that every marketer may be a carrier of various data!**
Of course, some will say that salesmen will never disappear! Because where there are people, there is marketing, and where there is marketing, there will be salesmen... This view cannot be refuted, but when you communicate with a salesperson (or customer service) across the screen, you may one day not be able to tell whether the other party is human or machine!
Or, suppose you are a store owner, you no longer have to worry about dealing with salesmen coming in and out every day, because your orders have been calculated and pushed to you at regular intervals, exactly matching your store's needs!

**Liu Chunxiong's Comment:**
**Each generation of marketers has its core value.**
**In the era of wholesale, the value of salespeople was to find customers.**
**In the era of deep distribution, the value of salesmen was channel operation and management.**
**In the era of channel digitalization, the core value of frontline personnel is user reach (connecting users) and BC integrated operation (online operation completed by the middle platform).**
**This means that the focus of frontline marketers will shift from 2B operational management to 2C connection and BC-combined operational management. This is an operational model combining offline (people) and online (machines). Teacher Fang Gang called it human components, which is quite vivid.**
**When core value no longer exists, the profession disappears.**
**Just as wholesalers were replaced by distributors, distributors will soon be replaced by operators. Salesmen replaced salespeople, and in the future, new positions will replace salesmen.**
**Intermediaries will always exist, but distributors will disappear.**
**Frontline marketers will always exist, but salesmen will disappear.**

Source: Teacher Liu's Digital New Marketing (ID: liuchunxiong1964) Author: Fang Gang


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