Right now a college student in Sweden—let’s call him
Sven—has a rather unusual summer job. He’s in sales, but he hasn’t met anyone
from the company whose products he pushes. His boss is an app. It considers
Sven’s strengths and weaknesses as a salesman, matches him with goods from any
of a dozen brands, and plots a route through Stockholm optimized to include as
many potential customers as possible in the time allotted to him. The app is
like Uber, but for a sales force. It has many of the same dynamics: Companies
can use it to get salespeople on demand, and those salespeople choose when to
work and which assignments to accept. The startup behind it, Universal Avenue,
calls the idea “sales as a service.”
While the Stockholm-based company may be pioneering this
model of it, outsourcing functions traditionally considered integral to a
business is a trend that’s gaining steam with certain types of companies. Anyone
who needs to put salespeople in front of potential customers who aren’t
otherwise economical to reach can do so, it seems, by combining the magic of a
remote workforce and fractional employment.
The “sharing economy” is best known for services
offered to consumers—think Uber and Airbnb. But what this more-recent trend
shows is that it can be just as applicable to business-to-business
transactions. In this case, its efficiencies are making direct sales possible
for small and midsize businesses. The technology may be novel, but this model
of sales isn’t exactly new. For more than 50 years, Americans have been selling
each other Tupperware, cosmetics and magazine subscriptions on commission and
in their spare time. The barrier to applying the same model to
business-to-business sales was information.
Even in “inside sales,” the sort in which everyone stays at
their desk, calling customers and giving demonstrations over the Web, there is
generally a lot to be gained from having everyone close together, saysPeter
Levine, a partner at venture investor Andreessen Horowitz. This model, in which salespeople are deeply
integrated into a business, remains the only option when you’re selling
high-value goods to large companies, says Greg Schott, chief executive of
Mulesoft, which sells big companies business software that stitches together
other business software. Selling to senior executives is a high-touch process.
Selling subscription-based software requires long-term
hand-holding, because dissatisfied customers can cancel at any time. But for
sales to everyone besides the hulking giants of the business world, learning
can happen in many other ways, some of which are rare or impossible with
traditional sales teams. That’s because every time one of his “brand
ambassadors” connects with a shop or restaurant owner, everything they learn
about that business is dumped into a centralized database so it can be used to
figure out what else that person might want to buy. It’s a network effect. The
more businesses Mr. Lilja reaches, the better his freelancers can be at selling
them things.
Universal Avenue’s customers include Stockholm-based
payments company iZettle, Europe’s answer to Square Inc. It’s exactly the sort
of point-of-sale device and service that must be sold to shops, bars and
restaurants one skeptical small-business owner at a time. According to rival
Upwork, freelancers in sales made $9.8 million on the platform last quarter,
and 6,700 sales jobs are posted to the site every month, up 57% from a year
ago.
Click here to access the full
article on The Wall Street Journal.