Why you will be outsourced
You can relax a bit. It won’t be for a long time and won’t be as bad as you think. A more accurate statement is that the role of sales and sales engineering will eventually be handled mostly by firms that specialize in the sales function.
Why have I recently come to this conclusion? The long-term trend suggests that relentless focus on cost reduction will force companies to eventually outsource everything but their value creating operations. Sales can generate additional revenue but is not a value-creation activity–it’s value transference. If you disagree, think of how much revenue you can produce without something to sell. 
The marketplace will eventually produce companies that are very efficient at providing sales forces to other businesses. At this point Sales becomes the value-creating activity for these new companies.
Don’t let the slow, monolithic beasts of today’s outsourcers fool you. As businesses become better at measuring their own operations by using correct metrics, we will get better at constructing mutually beneficial agreements. Today’s outsourcing agreements are hundreds of pages and provide each party an outline of the minimum duties they can get away with performing.
We will get past this phase of infancy. It just may take us another 10-20 years. From what I am seeing now, though, I believe economic pressures will exert a huge influence on removal of value transference activities.
[EDIT: note I said outsource, not offshore. No, I do not believe face-to-face sales can be fully replaced]
[EDIT: Reader JP pointed out a great example of company doing just this for SE work - http://pre-sales.com. Thanks!]
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Filed under: Management, Sales, Strategy
