My sales career started selling what we used to call dabbe. Originating from the Hindi word dabba which means box, it was a pejorative for cartons of a dumb product. Even in the naive cocksureness of youth, the irony of the term wasn’t lost on me.

Those boxes were computing equipment – Desktop Computers (or PCs, one of the most coveted acronyms at the time), servers, networking equipment — the physical building blocks of tech. I was an Account Executive at one of India’s biggest homegrown IT companies. It was B2B sales, though it would still be a few years before it would be commonly called that.

I was selling to enterprise, mid-market, government, banking, education – everything that fell under my territory. You see, I was the first AE to be assigned that particular geography, so I pretty much had an open field to run across. Not very different from selling for a startup. Very different from B2B as we know it today. Somewhat like B2C, not how we know it now, but the old-school door-to-door salesman type.

Tech Sales, not so Techie

It was the early 2000s and we had just emerged from the shadows of the Y2K bug. We were selling technology. The way we did it was anything but high-tech.

Email existed, but that’s not how you communicated with clients. Bandwidth was expensive, and only accessible through a 56 kbps dialup modem. No WhatsApp, just Yahoo and ICQ chat rooms. In a few years, Blackberry was going to take over. No Zoom or Meet. In fact, shortly after, I would be selling WebEx, which had created a huge buzz for transforming boardroom and C-suite communications at multinationals.

We found leads in Yellow Pages, business directories, and through word on the street. Customers were contacted on landline phones. Mobile phones were expensive; incoming calls had to be paid for too, so we used them essentially as pagers. Dot matrix printers churned out our mailers.

The Magic in the Sales Process

So how did we make sales happen?

By simply showing up.

As salespersons, we were supposed to be out in the field. Finding customers, meeting them, closing deals. Hitting a daily quota of sales calls, which would distill into hitting the quarterly sales quota. Mind you, the sales call wasn’t a call on the phone or over Zoom, but physically, in person, at the customer’s office. That was way, way before Covid. Everyone would be found in their office. Except the sales person, of course.

There were days when we literally camped out at the customer’s office. Waiting in the lobby, avoiding the searing gaze of the receptionist, hoping to bump into someone who mattered. Building relationships has always been a matter of time, patience, and in our case, a bit of nerve.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t easy. You needed that fire in the belly burning to keep going.

At my age now, fire in the belly has taken on a different meaning. It can still keep me up at night.

CRM? What’s That?

Never once do I recall the word CRM being uttered during my first sales training. We were a batch of dreamy-eyed graduates who had been handpicked from the best engineering colleges across India. Our first week at our first job was spent at the company headquarters being trained on product and the selling game. Everything from prospecting to closing, and beyond, but there was nothing about where all the data lived.

The records and contracts lived in box files – perhaps the most literal manifestation of the dabbe culture of the time. Orders would be faxed to regional HQs. And most of the sales reps’ data lived in their precious notebooks. Or in their heads. We remembered addresses, phone numbers and contract information, in between everything else that mattered to the deal. Keeping track of all those deals and contacts was a mental game, largely.

Then one day, I was told to start using Excel. The original CRM. Probably the only thing to have survived and remained relevant till now.

Every few months, management would pass down a new spreadsheet template and declare it the best way to track deals. I would spend Friday evenings filling in fields so my manager had something to talk about on the Monday morning sales conference call. We made it work.

The Sales Tech Stack Overload

Since those low-tech early days, we have come a long way. Today, we’ve got more tech tools for sales reps than they know what to do with. Things have become so high-tech that now we have tech tools to help work with tech tools.

You can reach thousands of prospects with one click. Know how many opened your messages. You don’t have to remember sending follow-up emails. You don’t even have to check your calendar for scheduling meetings. You can log every interaction with precision. Get insights on what went on during a sales meeting, what to do next.

Every step of the process is a data point now.

Has this made life easier for the sales rep?

The Future of B2B Sales Evolution

Once a salesperson, always a salesperson.

Over the course of my career, I have seen enough cycles to know a few things about sales. The most important one being that the fundamentals will remain the same. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that people buy from people. This is as true today as it was when I started working, as much as it was when someone first sold something. That underlying arch of trust is what supports and enables any sales transaction. Tools will change, markets will shift and products will evolve.

With the ascent of AI in every aspect of our lives, it becomes imperative to examine how it can help sales teams maintain the human element. What I see happening instead is the proliferation of AI-enabled tools working with sales teams at every step. Making workflows more complex, instead of simplifying them. Often forgetting the human element that belongs to the sales rep.

It feels like perfecting the science at the expense of killing the art.

Yet, AI is here to stay. B2B sales is at an incredible juncture, as AI continues burrowing into workflows and processes. The near future is going to be an exciting period to witness how the life of the salesperson changes.

I believe the most successful sales professionals won’t be those who resist technology, nor those who embrace it blindly. It will be those who master the balance – using tech to handle the dabbe (the commoditised parts of the job) while preserving their uniquely human ability to connect, understand, and build trust.

Those who can use the science to improve the art.