Death of a GTMman

This title above is possibly my favourite comment of 635 replies I scrolled through on a tweet bemoaning the latest generational attempt to rebrand the Sales dept.

Just like Arthur Miller's iconic Willy Loman, I've lived through a fair few of such revamps in my selling lot, on occasion wondering what it's all about and where I might now fit in. If at all.

For today's Go-To-Market there's been BusDev, Solutions, Revenue and most recently Growth as variants. Yet these mutations are not adaptations to a changing environment in the Darwinian sense. None fashion a smoother existence in a morphing world.

In working memory Accounts may have become Finance, Production to wit Development, and (ready to wash my mouth out) Personnel turn HR or People or Talent or whatever BS they come up with to leech off actual prosperity makers.

You can kinda get with (some of) those types of evolution.

But Sales as anything else? Particularly GTM? Nope.

Yet the irony persists. Sales is not a great label. It's simply too inward. True sales - the solution kind we're pursuing here at any rate - is about that 'delighting the customer' vibe.

One shame is if ever a prospect called in to make an enquiry, they'd have to ask to "speak to someone in Sales". They could hardly ask to speak to one of our buyers. Always felt sadly mixed up wrong way 'round.

Yes, each new cohort likely feels the gripe nagging away at them that Sales as a function name just doesn't quite cut it. But Sales it is.

I'm reminded of many a quip. Like the insurance broker who at social dos when asked what they did for a living would say they bought insurance. On behalf of clients, natch. Cue floods of eager prospects suddenly presenting themselves.

Sometimes, in fact all times, open, candid, fronting up messaging is the order of the day. Yes, I'm in Sales. Say it proud.

The winners among us though, they have a unique understanding of what the term means. And this is where we shine.

Because inherent in our purpose is the solving of a particular state of affairs our clients encounter. That's what drives us. Helping them understand what they're up against. Where they wish a fix. How they seek progress.

That is what we talk to our prospects about. Willy Loman's tragedy was never his job. Ours must never be our label. He'd spent a career being the wrong kind of visible. We cannot fall into the same.

Rebrand shmebrand. Whatever the 'reinvention', you can't rename your way out of what the job actually is. Sales doesn't need to magic up a different kind of visible. It needs practitioners willing to stand in the true one.

And then, we tap into the ol' wisdom;

'nobody likes to be sold, but everyone likes to buy'.