Britain’s largest profession needs an effective institute to see it safely into the 21st century.

For a profession that prides itself on being proactive and go-getting, it’s amazing how stuck in the mud the world of selling actually is. And because selling in all its guises is by far the UK’s largest profession, this is actually very worrying for the future of our economy.

Not a day seems to go by without one social media advocate or another trumpeting the demise of that cornerstone of the business-to-business (B2B) sales world – cold-calling.

As we look out over 2009, one thing is abundantly clear: the economic landscape at the end of this year will be completely different from the way it appears now.

Bankers need to learn to engage with customers again.

Is the financial world becoming just too complex for customers, regulators and salespeople to understand?

Here at ModernSelling.com we’re champions of all that’s good in selling: but we’re also firm believers in exposing incompetence and poor practice wherever and whenever we encounter it.

It’s time to dust off all those old ‘banker’ jokes you used to tell (Q: what’s the collective term for a group of bankers? A: a ‘wunch’ – Ed); this week has been a torrid one for the banks, with a slew of poor financial results for the first half of the year unveiled, capped off by Northern Rock’s announcement of a Ł585.4 million loss.

When it comes to sales activity, you can measure quantity but not quality… and therefore the concept of quality is meaningless. Selling is just a numbers game: the more active you are, the more sales you’ll make – that’s the legitimate view of a sizeable proportion of the sales management community and one that has been argued extensively in the ModernSelling.com Reader Forum.

Consumer complaints are highest in many of those fiercely competitive commercial sectors which rely to a large extent on salespeople or ‘advisers’ to promote their products. Can this be just an unhappy coincidence?

Salespeople: they’re expensive, wayward, and difficult to manage. What’s more, they can be fickle, some are unscrupulous, and many are not very good; some marketing evangelists have even tried to say that the sales role is redundant. So, who needs ’em?

How easy is it to sell in a recession? Hopefully, we may not get to that stage if the Bank of England’s reported programme of interest rate cuts materialises. But it’s as well to be prepared.

Sales is not only the largest business discipline, it’s also the most important; yet, in the UK, selling remains lamentably unprofessional both in outlook and the way it’s regarded. With so much change going on – both in sales and the wider business world – the time for complacency is over. We need to act now to build a strong profession.

We’re in a period of unprecedented change for the sales profession. On the one hand, business relies on us more than ever as revenue-creation takes over from acquisition as the main driver of growth for hard-pressed chief executives; on the other hand, consumers, legislators and mounting costs are combining to ensure that traditional approaches to the marketplace are no longer fit for purpose.

We’ve heard all the jokes – women speak in oestrogen and men listen in testosterone – but the battle of the sexes is raging within sales. It seems likely, however, that one day the majority of salespeople will be women.

I read a blog recently suggesting that one of the most powerful drivers for sales and long-term career success is a client’s trust in an individual salesperson – trust in that person’s judgement, trust in their business perspective and market knowledge, and trust in their integrity.

The recent widely reported news that email at work holds a ‘powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a direct result of email-related pressure’ can surely come as no surprise.

Salespeople have a vast range of talents… even if they don’t always want to be salespeople.

You’d think that busy businesspeople would have enough to do in the real world without worrying about the virtual lives of the geeks who inhabit SecondLife.com. Not so!

There has been endless hype about Web 2.0 and its long-term effects on consumer behaviour and buying habits. This, coupled with the relentless pace of new technology, has meant that it has sometimes been difficult to separate real trends from mere wishful thinking on the part of new media advocates.