Just after the New Year's Day holiday, JD.com's 'New Channel Business Unit' targeting end terminals made salespeople in traditional enterprises, who spend their days among distributors, sense the danger of losing their jobs. Those who relied on the 'opening points, pushing inventory, collecting payments' approach began cursing e-commerce platforms for the first time! Shortly after the release of the 2015 semi-annual financial reports, affected by the overall economic environment, layoffs at major tech companies were frequent. Tesla cut 200 jobs, Lenovo laid off 3,200 non-production employees at once, Yahoo basically said goodbye to the Chinese market, and even Alibaba's recruitment plan was slashed from 3,000 to 400 people. Layoffs are often due to failure to meet sales targets, so salespeople under performance pressure are also easy targets. Having narrowly avoided being laid off in the mid-year, just after the New Year's Day holiday, JD.com's 'New Channel Business Unit' targeting end terminals made salespeople in traditional enterprises, who spend their days among distributors, sense the danger of losing their jobs. Those who relied on the 'opening points, pushing inventory, collecting payments' approach began cursing e-commerce platforms for the first time! It is still too early to tell what waves JD.com's 'New Channel Business Unit' will stir up. But from Liu Qiangdong's speech at the annual meeting, it can be roughly seen that it is manufacturers directly connecting with JD's warehouses, sharing and utilizing JD's warehousing and logistics, and delivering goods directly to various retail stores. If this logic holds, traditional enterprises, besides needing a very small number of salespeople to interface with JD for key account management, seem to have no connection with those salespeople who do daily store visits and even network expansion in the value chain of this business?! Will sales, a position that was once standard for many enterprises, change from a rigid demand to an elastic demand, or even no demand? Some salespeople privately lamented that if they had known this would happen, they should have heeded their parents' advice: 'A skill in hand is better than a fortune in the bank.' They wouldn't have ended up in a no-man's land. Of course, some believe this inexplicable panic among salespeople is like a child crying wolf. But in this era, it's common for elephants to fight and ants to be trampled. During social transitions, a position disappearing out of thin air is nothing new. After email came out, how many door-to-door mail carriers are still active in our lives? Living in the Internet age, change is certain; staying the same is the exception, especially for salespeople. This B2B alarm sounded by JD, besides warning those distributors who wait for customers in their stores, what changes does it bring to the sales positions derived from channels? Change 1: The need for horizontal expansion of sales skills increases. After B2B implementation, one possible scenario is that manufacturers hire only a small number of platform salespeople. Various professional sales companies will emerge in the channels, undertaking store expansion and maintenance business through platforms. These professional sales companies will hire some salespeople as their employees, who not only sell brand A but also brand B, not only toilets but also flooring. Brand generalization and category generalization impose width requirements on salespeople's knowledge systems and sales skills. For example, can salespeople reasonably classify the skills they have mastered into universal skills and industry-specific sales skills? The ability to distill and apply universal sales skills will determine their ability and speed to adapt to new business models. Change 2: Information asymmetry will be completely broken. In the past, as manufacturer representatives, we had some resources and power. We could bluff about product price increases to trick sales, or fool distributors into thinking bestsellers were in short supply to push inventory. If the big B side (platforms like JD) and the small B side (terminal stores) are fully networked, the system will inevitably have an open information platform. Information about promotions and inventory levels will definitely be open to retailers (this is also the driving force to attract retailers into the system). In the future, salespeople who don't seriously interpret platform policies may be less sensitive to information than retailers. Those who rely on information for a living will have no food to eat. Those who can provide consultative sales to stores, those with tools, methods, and routines, are the ones truly welcomed by retailers. Change 3: Dancing in chains is an inevitable transformation. The special nature of the sales position determines that it requires personal self-discipline to grow. In the past, many enterprises' laissez-faire management cultivated lazy habits among salespeople, with many having fabricated itineraries and written false reports. But with the intervention of B2B, the competitive pressure on salespeople has suddenly increased. Besides the ability to extract store performance at any time, the development and maturity of field sales software have basically made it possible to solidify the workflow of salespeople, achieve standardized operations, and improve offline sales efficiency. Although we can still see some salespeople using tricks to evade field monitoring, technology improvement is endless; as long as there is demand, technology will surely meet it. In the B2B era, this trend will become more obvious. Any industry upgrade, whether driven by demand or capital, and regardless of success or failure, will leave its mark on the industry. This is the pain that innovation brings us, and also the value it brings. On the other hand, as long as the real economy remains the mainstay of the national economy, change will inevitably contain constancy, and inherited development is a cliché for salespeople. Does the arrival of this B2B storm mean that the sales skills passed down for decades or even centuries will have no place to be used? I think most people won't be so pessimistic, but many are confused about how to break up, crush, and reassemble original skills. The constancy in change, I think, should include the following three aspects: Constancy 1: The understanding of the essence of trade business should not change. The development of platform e-commerce, especially internet finance, has changed many people's understanding of profit models. The past profit method of buying low and selling high has been despised and attacked, which is one side of the internet's mixed bag. Making traffic, earning time differences in cash, and burning venture capital money have become the catchphrases of many salespeople 'educating' distributors. Guiding distributors to cut prices has become the 'most correct' strategic choice. Of course, I don't oppose diversifying profit models, but some must be pragmatic while others are idealistic; enterprises must be pragmatic in some aspects and idealistic in others. It's understandable for platform companies to innovate profit models; trying is itself a form of progress. But if distributors, including traditional channel merchants, don't achieve profitability by providing value-added services but by using low prices to hijack traffic and use traffic to hijack manufacturers, and everyone is idealistic, where will the daily necessities come from? Constancy 2: The more basic the skills, the less they should change. A mature salesperson should know how to plan routes, discover problems in stores, verify problems, and solve problems. These basic skills, no matter which version of Internet X.0, are the basic logic of sales. Some say these tasks can be done with electronic scanning. I want to say that we can scan to see which competitors' products have increased in stores, but we cannot scan the changes in retailers' attitudes and emotions toward salespeople. We can scan the near-expiry products in distributors' warehouses, but we cannot scan the signal that the distributor in front of us is on the verge of a family conflict due to a mistress. Constancy 3: Maintaining due respect for individual distributors should not change. In the era of a seller's market, some salespeople were too arrogant toward distributors; in the era of channel dominance, some salespeople were too servile to channel merchants; in the era of terminal victory, salespeople began to discard channel merchants like worn-out shoes. Some salespeople from big brands, relying on the power of their brands, swaggered in front of distributors, lacking basic respect for distributors and partners. I want to emphasize that only business built on equal relationships can last. Distributors, as entrepreneurs, as bosses big or small, as people who give rather than take, absolutely deserve due respect from every salesperson. So, whether it's the Internet or Internet thinking, even if the logic of business can be innovated and changed, the common sense and principles of business are the foundation for the sustainable and stable development of the commercial society. Facing B2B, salespeople are at a crossroads: one thought can make them a demon or a Buddha? The change and constancy in the B2B era may become a watershed for the sales community. What should change but doesn't will either be crushed by the trend or lead to self-destruction; what shouldn't change but does may lose the original intention, find no way back, or fall into darkness, unable to find the goal. This article was originally contributed by Teacher Huang Runlin. Want to join the discussion? Long press the QR code below to follow '365 Business School', reply '365', and you can participate in the big-shot community discussion. Come join us! Disclaimer: The articles and images published in this official account are for internal communication purposes only, and the source is noted in a prominent position. 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