The Hidden Friction in Modern Sales
A lot of sales teams are working harder than ever and getting less in return.
More outreach. More content. More meetings. More pressure. And still less traction.
That is not just a performance problem. It is a relevance problem.
Too many organisations are still trying to sell in the 21st century with a mental model built for the industrial age. They are using an old map in a market that has completely changed.
At the centre of that mismatch is one big issue: the meaning of value has changed. What customers buy, how they decide, and what they expect from salespeople has evolved dramatically. But many sales strategies have not kept up.
To understand why modern sales feels so difficult, we need to understand how value itself has evolved.
Era 1: Value as the Product
In the industrial era, value was seen as something built into the product.
If you could manufacture efficiently, standardise quality, and distribute at scale, you won. The salesperson’s job was simple: explain the features, demonstrate the functionality, and close the deal.
Henry Ford captured that logic perfectly:
“You can have any colour as long as it is black.”
In that world, the supplier defined value. The customer could accept it or reject it, but they did not shape it.
And although the world has changed, that reflex is still alive in many sales teams today.
A lot of salespeople still believe that if the product is better, the customer should see it. And when the customer does not, the instinct is to push harder. More facts. More features. More arguments. More information.
That reflex is deeply human. When someone does not agree with us, we tend to assume they are missing something. So we try to persuade by explaining more. We overpower them with logic and information, hoping they will eventually come around.
But that is exactly where modern sales breaks down.
In our courses, we often use role plays to show how quickly people fall back into this default mode. Even when they know better, they start pitching. It is almost automatic. And that is the point: pitching the product is not just a bad habit. It is the legacy of an older era.
The problem is that in today’s markets, functionality is rarely a differentiator. It is expected. It is the entry ticket.
So when you lead with the product, you reduce yourself to a commodity. You force the buyer into comparison mode. And once that happens, price becomes the easiest way to decide.
That is why so many sales conversations create friction from the start.
Era 2: Lifestyle Value
As markets matured and product quality became more uniform, value shifted from the functional to the symbolic.
Products no longer won just because they worked. They won because of what they meant. Brands started selling identity, aspiration, and lifestyle. The offer became less about utility and more about the story around it.
This was the era of mass marketing and persuasion.
On the surface, it looked like progress. Sales moved beyond feature-dumping. Emotion entered the conversation. Meaning mattered.
But the structure stayed the same.
The supplier still designed the value proposition. The customer still received it. The only difference was that the package had become more seductive.
This mindset still shapes a lot of sales training today. Many salespeople are taught to ask questions, but often only to gather ammunition. The goal is not really to explore with the customer. The goal is to collect enough information to guide the customer toward the product the seller already wants to sell.
That is an improvement over pitching, but not by much.
If you are still teaching open and closed questions mainly as a way to funnel the customer toward your solution, you are still stuck in this era. The conversation may feel more consultative, but the logic underneath is still supplier-led.
And customers feel that.
They can tell when a “discovery conversation” is really just a smarter route to the same old pitch. That is why so many buyers have become resistant to polished sales talk. They do not want to be managed through a funnel. They want help making sense of their own situation.
Era 3: Value as an Experience
The next big shift came in the 1990s, when sales started moving toward personal relevance.
With the rise of CRM, customer insight, and consultative methods, sellers began focusing less on average market needs and more on individual customer problems. The value of the salesperson was no longer just in presenting an offer, but in helping the buyer understand their needs more clearly.
This was a major leap forward.
The salesperson became more of a guide. They diagnosed problems, uncovered latent needs, and helped customers see why change mattered. Insight selling and consultative selling professionalised the commercial role in an important way.
This was also the beginning of what Mads Winter described in one of our podcasts as Buyer Enablement: helping the customer make the purchase. At one point in the Netherlands, the term Buying Coach was even used for the salesperson. That label says a lot. Sales was no longer just about pushing a product. It was increasingly about helping the buyer move.
But there was still a limit to this model.
The supplier still largely owned the value logic. The solution was usually developed in advance, in relative isolation, and then connected to the customer’s needs by a clever salesperson. The customer received a tailored answer, but they were still not really shaping the answer itself.
So yes, the salesperson had become a guide. But the customer was still mostly a recipient of value, not a co-creator of it.
Era 4: Value Co-Creation
That brings us to the next shift: value co-creation.
Once products and services become easy to copy, value can no longer be treated as something fixed and delivered downstream. It has to be built together.
In this era, value is not a thing the supplier hands over. It is an outcome shaped jointly through interaction, dialogue, and design. The sales conversation itself becomes part of the value creation process.
That changes everything.
The best proposition is no longer the one with the most features. It is the one that is most relevant, most contextual, and most jointly shaped.
We started seeing this in our own research as early as 2009. Buyers no longer wanted to be passive targets of a value proposition. They wanted to participate in creating the proposition itself.
And co-creation is much broader than many people think.
It is not just about developing new products together. Over the past fifteen years, we have seen multiple forms of it: product co-creation, solution co-creation, strategic co-creation, and even the co-creation of entirely new business models.
This broader view also aligns with the work of Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch, whose service-dominant logic reframed value as something that is co-created in use rather than embedded in a product. Their work helped move the discussion away from value as an object and toward value as a relational and contextual outcome.
Recent B2B research takes this even further by showing that value creation increasingly happens across sales ecosystems rather than in a simple one-to-one buyer-seller exchange. In other words, value is now shaped by networks of actors, capabilities, and interactions, not just by the offer itself.
This is where the salesperson stops being a presenter of value and becomes a builder of value.
And that is a much more defensible position.
A jointly created solution is harder to copy because it is tied to a specific customer context, shaped by a specific relationship, and embedded in a specific business reality. Competitors can copy your features. They cannot easily copy something the customer helped build.
Era 5: Systemic and Regenerative Value
Today, even co-creation is no longer enough on its own.
We are now moving into a world of systemic and regenerative value.
Customers are operating in increasingly complex environments. Their challenges are not isolated. They sit inside systems: supply chains, ecosystems, stakeholder networks, regulations, technologies, internal politics, and shifting market conditions.
So buyers are not just looking for a solution to one problem. They are looking for partners who can help them navigate interdependence, build resilience, and improve the health of the broader system over time.
That is what systemic value is about.
Regenerative value goes one step further. It is not only about helping the customer survive or optimise. It is about helping them strengthen the system they depend on so that value grows over time rather than erodes.
My own thinking on regenerative value has also been strengthened by the work of Philip Kotler, Christian Sarkar, and Jef Teugels through the Regenerative Marketing Institute and the Regeneration Journal. What I find especially valuable in their work is that they move beyond the narrow language of sustainability and ask a tougher question: does a commercial system merely reduce harm, or does it actively contribute to the resilience and renewal of the wider ecosystem? That is exactly the direction in which I believe modern sales and marketing need to evolve.
This is also where mainstream B2B thinking is beginning to catch up. More recent work on the future of B2B sales points to a commercial model that is more hybrid, more complex, and more dependent on helping customers navigate change, align internal stakeholders, and make better decisions under uncertainty.
This is exactly why sales is becoming more human again.
Yes, AI will automate a lot. Yes, it will replace many tasks. Yes, product knowledge is increasingly commoditised.
But getting people to change their behaviour, align their interests, rethink their assumptions, and move forward together in uncertain environments is still deeply human work.
We are social beings. We are influenced by other humans. We trust people before we trust systems. And when uncertainty rises, the need for human sense-making rises with it.
That is why I believe sales is not disappearing. It is changing shape.
For years, sales became more structured, more process-driven, more systematised. That brought discipline and professionalism. But now we are seeing something else emerge: the return of sales as human persuasion, dialogue, and sense-making.
Sales is becoming human again.
The salesperson of the future is not just a process manager or solution seller. They are someone who can help customers interpret complexity, align stakeholders, reduce uncertainty, and move toward action.
AI can support that work. It cannot replace it.
Conclusion: The Future of Sales Is Not More Pitching
The path is clear.
Value has evolved from Product, to Meaning, to Personal Relevance, to Co-Creation, and now to Systemic and Regenerative Value.
That means the role of sales has changed too.
Sales is no longer about pushing a proposition through a funnel. It is no longer about mastering techniques to persuade people into buying. And it is definitely no longer about overwhelming customers with information and hoping logic will do the rest.
Modern sales is about helping customers make sense of a changing world.
It is about building value with them, not presenting value to them.
It is about reducing complexity, aligning people, and shaping better outcomes inside systems that are increasingly hard to navigate.
That is not a small upgrade to the old sales model.
It is a complete redefinition of the profession.
And the uncomfortable question for many organisations is this:
Has your sales strategy actually evolved with the market, or are you still trying to sell a black car to a world that no longer wants one?
Further Reading
For readers who want to explore the thinking behind this shift in more depth, the following authors and sources are especially worth reading:
- Philip Kotler, Christian Sarkar, and Jef Teugels on regenerative marketing, resilience, and the renewal of commercial systems: Regenerative Marketing Institute, Philip Kotler on regeneration in a permacrisis world, and Jef Teugels’ writing in the Regeneration Journal.
- Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch on service-dominant logic and the idea that value is co-created rather than embedded in products: Institutions and Axioms: An Extension and Update of Service-Dominant Logic.
- Research on value co-creation in B2B sales ecosystems, which shows how value increasingly emerges across networks rather than simple buyer-seller exchanges.
- Mads Winter on Buyer Enablement and the changing role of sales in helping customers make confident decisions: https://salescubes.com/how-strong-is-the-mental-strength-of-your-sales-organisation-mads-winther-the-future-of-sales/
- McKinsey’s work on the future of B2B sales, especially on complexity, hybrid selling, and the growing importance of stakeholder alignment under uncertainty: B2B Sales Strategies: The Big Reframe.
