In the mid-1970s, a sales rep covering northern Ohio could reasonably expect to retire with the same customers he started with. He knew which buyers hated surprises, which ones always waited until the last week of the quarter, and which assistant actually decided what made it onto the calendar. When something went wrong, he drove out and sat in the office until it didn’t feel awkward anymore.
That rep didn’t think of himself as a “relationship seller.” He was just doing the job. Today, that job barely exists.
When Sales Was Slow Enough to Remember Names
For much of the twentieth century, selling rewarded patience. Companies sold physical products, signed multi-year contracts, and measured success in long arcs. Customers stayed put. Vendors stayed put. The rep in between became part of the furniture.
At firms like IBM and Xerox, field reps were expected to stay with accounts for years. Sometimes decades. Promotions came from consistency, not velocity. A rep’s value lived in memory: who preferred phone calls, who hated contract language, who needed to be buttered up before feeling sold—think the account managers in Mad Men. In that world, the relationship wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the product.
Scale Starts Asking Uncomfortable Questions
The first real pressure on the relationship rep came from inside. As companies expanded, leadership wanted visibility. Forecasts. Predictability. Fewer surprises tied to personalities. Reps who “just knew” their customers made executives nervous. Knowledge locked inside people felt risky.
So systems arrived. First as spreadsheets. Then as databases. Then as full CRMs. Once customer history could be logged, reviewed, and transferred, account ownership became flexible. Territories could be redrawn. Coverage could be optimized. The rep stopped being the archive. That shift fundamentally changed the job.
Speed Replaces Stewardship
Software accelerated everything. Products updated constantly. Buying cycles shortened. Growth targets became aggressive. Public markets rewarded momentum instead of slow and steady (healthy) growth. In that environment, long-term account ownership started to look inefficient.
Specialization followed. New business reps hunted for logos. Account managers handled renewals. Customer success teams focused on adoption. Expansion became its own motion. The single rep who once handled everything from introduction to renewal turned into a relay runner passing the baton every few quarters.
Each handoff made sense on paper… but every handoff thinned the relationship. Customers met more sellers. Sellers spent less time with each account. Familiarity faded.
Measurement Quietly Wins the Argument
Modern sales organizations didn’t reject relationships. They simply stopped rewarding them. Territories changed. Compensation favored new bookings. Staying with the same account year after year rarely helped a rep’s upside. Moving on usually did.
Meanwhile, the artifacts of relationship stayed behind. Notes in the CRM. Account plans. Call summaries. Quarterly business reviews. The appearance of continuity survived, even as the people rotated.
Reps learned the rules quickly. Build rapport, but don’t linger. Know the account, but don’t get attached.
What Actually Disappeared
The loss wasn’t charm or care. Plenty of modern reps are thoughtful and invested. What disappeared was time. Time to watch a customer grow. Time to sit through a bad quarter without panic. Time to be trusted before being measured.
The relationship rep thrived in a slower economy with fewer tools and fewer expectations. Today’s economy prizes speed, coverage, and predictability. Trust still matters, but it’s expected to form faster and travel further than it ever did before.
A Fair Trade, With Consequences
It would be easy to romanticize the past, but the old model had real problems. Reps hoarded information. Managers flew blind. Customers were exposed when their rep left. Modern systems fixed those issues. They made selling more reliable. They reduced dependence on individuals. They made growth possible at levels the relationship era couldn’t support.
But the fix came with a cost. Selling became thinner. Faster. Less personal. Customers learned to expect turnover. Reps learned not to promise permanence.
Where That Leaves Us
Companies still talk about long-term relationships. They just pursue them through systems instead of tenure. Trust has been spread across teams, tools, and processes. More resilient, maybe. Less human, absolutely.
The relationship rep didn’t disappear because the role stopped working. It disappeared because the world around it sped up, and asked the seller to behave more like a machine. Somewhere along the way, remembering names became optional.
