[ftwynn]

I think it's much more likely that bad sales will be tooled away/become obsolete. The Salesforce hygiene points hit especially hard for me.

That said, I hear a lot about how smart customers are and how they have more info, but as tech sales in cloud, I can say for sure that helping customers understand what their real problems are is the biggest part of the job.

Sometimes the requirements are framed in their last tech's limitations. Other times they're looking at too small a piece of their overall system's challenges, trading one bottleneck for another. Other times they're stuck in a big org's bureaucracy and need help threading that needle. Still other times they ask for a genuine opinion.

Maybe it's best described as a shifting role for sales. It used to be a pure discovery-problem sales solved. The future will be more consultative, which in either case will require better skilled sales teams.