I’ve been thinking about the future of the selling profession quite a bit lately, and I’m not the only one. I first wrote about this question back in 2012, when the prediction making the rounds was that the Internet would kill selling – that buyers would research and purchase everything online, and the salesperson would go the way of the travel agent. That prediction spawned magazine cover stories and expert panels, and I was part of more than one of them.
Here we are well over a decade later, and the selling profession is still standing. But the question hasn’t gone away – it’s just changed costumes. Today the prediction isn’t that the Internet will kill selling, it’s that AI will. And I think it’s worth asking honestly: are there entire groups of salespeople who have doomed themselves?
In short, I think it’s possible – and not because of the Internet or AI. Those are just the forces exposing a weakness that was already there. The salespeople in real danger are the ones still running the old playbook, the one built on controlling the customer, hoarding information, and pushing people through a process they never asked to be part of. That playbook shows up in a lot of industries, from car lots to copier sales to anyone whose pitch still leads with features and manufactured urgency. Let me start with the clearest example I know, and then I’ll explain why it’s not really about that industry at all.
The Clearest Example: Car Sales
I’ve talked before about car salespeople in this space, and I’ll say again that I earned the right to say every negative word about them, because I did that job for three years. I know how car salespeople are trained, how they’re managed, and how unceremoniously they’re dealt with by ownership. So when I say the profession has problems, I’m not throwing rocks from the cheap seats.
Are car salespeople as a whole doomed? I’m not sure even I would go that far. But I do think the role will change substantially, because the way that job has traditionally been done is fundamentally out of step with how people buy now.
Here’s the core problem: car salespeople don’t do what’s most needed by the dealers, which is customer acquisition and relationship building. Most dealers have one or maybe two veterans who’ve been there for the long haul and have customers coming in specifically to see them. When I was at Noller Ford, that guy was Gene Worthington, who had sold there for 26 years at the time. But Gene was the rare exception, and the structure of the business almost guarantees he stays rare.
It’s too transient a business, for one thing. The average buying cycle for a new car runs four or five years, while the average tenure of a car salesperson is far shorter than that, which means most salespeople almost never sell the same person two cars in a row. You simply can’t build a book of business that way. On top of that, the culture at most dealers says that when you’re not on the floor, you’re not working, which strips away any incentive to network, build relationships, or do the reach-out work that actually creates future customers.
And then there’s the training. Too many car salespeople are still working from a 1950s playbook built around controlling the customer and driving the conversation with manufactured fear and urgency. That approach produces exactly the kind of dialogue customers can’t wait to escape, which is why so many people would rather have a root canal than visit a dealership. When your sales approach actively makes the experience worse, you’re not adding value to what you sell – you’re subtracting it.
Now Look in the Mirror
It would be easy to read all that as a car-dealer problem and feel good about yourself, but that’s exactly the wrong response, because the disease isn’t confined to one industry. The car lot is just where it’s easiest to see. The same rot is at work anywhere salespeople were trained to win by controlling information and steering the customer, and a lot of B2B sales forces are further down that road than they’d like to admit.
Think about it honestly. If your salespeople’s main value was knowing the pricing, the specs, and the availability that customers couldn’t get anywhere else, that value is gone, because the customer can now get all of it in thirty seconds without you. If your team still opens with a feature dump instead of a question, they’re running the car-lot script in a nicer suit. If your relationships are purely transactional – if you only show up when it’s time to sell something and disappear in between – you’ve got the same transience problem that kills the car salesperson, just on a longer cycle. And if anyone on your team still talks about “controlling the sale” or “overcoming” the customer, they’re working from the 1950s playbook whether they sell cars or industrial equipment.
I call the modern market environment the Waters, and the Waters have shifted under everyone’s feet. The information imbalance that used to be the foundation of selling – where the salesperson held the brochures, the specs, the pricing, and the answers – hasn’t just shrunk, it’s reversed. Today’s buyer completes 70 to 80 percent of their Buyer’s Journey before they ever talk to a salesperson, and they often walk in knowing more about your market than your newest rep does.
The people doing the buying have changed too. Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly 71 percent of those with B2B buying authority, and they have no patience for the old gamesmanship – they grew up with transparent pricing and instant information, and they want their professional buying to work the same way. Here’s the part most people miss, though: this isn’t just a young-buyer phenomenon anymore. Plenty of Boomers and Gen Xers have watched how the younger generations buy and decided they like it better, so you can’t even profile your way to the right approach by guessing someone’s age.
Any salesperson whose entire value proposition was being the gatekeeper of information has already been replaced. The only question is whether they’ve noticed yet – and that’s true whether they sell cars, software, or anything in between.
So Are We Beyond Repair?
For the industries clinging to the old model, I’m honestly not sure. To prove it could be fixed, you’d need a company or a group of them who genuinely wanted to try something different, and in some industries I don’t see much of that in the marketplace. In car sales, more and more customers are doing their buying online and dealing with service people at delivery, which is cheaper for the dealer but does nothing to attract customers or build relationships – the two things a real salesperson is supposed to provide. That’s the dilemma, and I think the traditional car salesperson will be an endangered species within 20 years, simply because the industry will refuse to make the necessary changes.
But here’s the good news, and it applies to every salesperson reading this: adapting isn’t a death sentence. It’s the opposite. When information was scarce, almost anyone could make a living moving it around. Now that information is everywhere, the salespeople who actually know something worth knowing are more valuable than ever, because they offer what the internet and the AI bot can’t – real insight, sharp questions, and genuine help defining what success looks like. The old playbook is beyond repair. The profession is not.
My Forecast for the Profession
Business owners and managers are scrutinizing their sales dollars harder every year, and that’s not going to reverse. The salesperson of the future will have to justify their existence in three areas: year-over-year profit dollar growth, new customer acquisition, and the quality and stability of their customer relationships. Salespeople who can’t make their case in those terms are going to be gone, regardless of what they sell, and that pressure is going to force the overall skill level of the profession upward.
That’s not a threat to good salespeople – it’s the best thing that could happen to them, because it finally separates the people who add value from the people who just occupy territory.
If you want to dig deeper into how the Waters have changed and what it means for the way you sell, I’m doing a webinar on June 25 focused entirely on that question – where buyers actually are in 2026 and how to meet them there. Details and registration are here.
The selling profession isn’t beyond repair. But a lot of the old ways of doing it are, and whether you sell cars or anything else, the sooner we admit that, the sooner we can get on with the work of becoming the kind of salespeople buyers actually want to deal with.
