Death of a Middleman

July, 1998

This one is so obvious that most seem to miss it: If you're a middleman, then change jobs fast.

Forever, the economies of the world have been based on middlepeople. From carriers on the Silk Roads to Merchant Lords to Showroom Salesmen. The sheer difficulty in moving things around and getting them to the right people made salespeople a necessity.

Nowadays there's this buzzword called 'Value Added' which is bandied around in sales seminars. The theory seems to be that salespeople need to get a little better at making you feel warm-and-fuzzy in order to keep up with each other. This misses the point.

The term 'Value Added' itself is like the little warning puff of smoke you see coming out of a cannon a long way away. If you're good, you might see the little black dot getting closer. Soon, you can hear a noise, like something arriving fast.

And then the world becomes, briefly, a very exciting place.

Well, the Internet is that cannon, Direct Marketing is the ammunition, E-commerce is the whistling sound, and Salespeople are the targets. The point is that the Internet is going to do to sales what the combine harvester did to farming. The technology is much, much better at matching producer to consumer and handling the logistics of the transaction than humans are.

I'm not saying they'll go extinct, but the armies of salespeople employed in modern companies are going to disappear, leaving only the really good ones. And the good ones won't be selling televisions, they'll be brokering supercomputers or skyscrapers or other things worth millions where the Human Touch is still important.

What the hell is the economy going to do with millions of out-of-work salespeople? I have no idea. Maybe we should take a tip from the Golgafrinchams and build that B-Ark.