Instead of relying on high-priced salespeople with expensive tastes to sell products, many solution providers are relying more on low-key field sales engineers that are more effective at building relationships with customers over the long term. While the typical Type A sales personality tends to think in terms of transactions, the field sales engineer thinks more in terms of relationships. This is crucial psychological difference because most revenue is coming from existing customers and increasingly the services being provided by the solution provider are becoming automated.

In order to sell additional services, or for that matter products, solution providers are going to need to have a keen understanding of exactly what the customer requires. That means that the person representing the solution provider has to have a lot of technical knowledge to credibly recommend additional services and products.

In effect, the nature of the relationship between the customer and the solution provider is changing. There will always be some requirement for a Type A salesperson to land new accounts. But as a percentage of the overall sales organization, these types of people are going to be a relatively small number of specialists dedicated to that activity, versus expensive sales people that get paid a monthly commission on every piece of revenue that flows through an existing customer, especially when an increasing percentage of that revenue stems from ongoing automated services.

Times are especially tough for the Type A sales personality and a lot of them are holding out hope that things will return to normal once the economy changes. But many of them should also recognize that the way IT is delivered and consumed has fundamentally changed. This will have more of a profound effect on them then any downturn ever will. And given that, many of them need to start thinking now about how to reinvent them selves before they become the modern equivalent of the traveling salesman.