Quiz: Do Execs Prefer Face-to-Face Selling?

A recent Sales Machine post and poll asked "Will 'Face-To-Face' Selling Be Obsolete?" About half of the Sales Machine readers who voted in that poll insisted that face-to-face would remain "absolutely necessary." So says the selling community. But what about the BUYING community?

A recent poll of B2B executive decision-makers determined exactly whether they prefer to be sold face-to-face, or through some other means (like telephone or online.) Care to take a guess ? Here's a poll:

CLICK HERE for the correct answer »
The correct answer is 90 percent!

At the recent Sales 2.0 conference, a presentation by Gerhard Gschwandtner revealed the interesting fact that, according to a recent poll "87 percent of executives said that when it comes to closing business, nothing beats face-to-face."

That's a pretty astounding figure, in my view, especially since most companies are ramping up inside sales, telesales, in order to save money. The statistic also calls into question the conventional wisdom that B2B buyers want to shop online. The strong preference also makes me wonder whether online conferencing is going to be all that useful in sales environments.

Readers: What do you think? Is this a generational thing? Or is the need for face-to-face contact truly eternal?