The role of the online sales person will change dramtically in the coming years according to Adexchanger.com. Tomorrow's publisher sales team will be made up of two very distinct roles: the "ad trader" and the "direct seller".

The AdExchanger blog, which covers all matters relating to ad exchanges, explains more in its post on the web publishers of the future:

To be clear, we’re not suggesting that the direct sales team is going to be dissolved - quite the contrary, the sales team will divide into two important functions.

The Direct Sales Team

In the future, the direct sales team will be selling custom, integrated sponsorships and ad deals that get the advertiser’s brand closer to the large site’s brand and its valuable users. Of course, these deals will command high CPMs and due to their complexity will make the direct sellers an important and essential part of the sales team.

For the most part, display inventory will no longer be a part of the direct sellers’ annual sales goals as the inventory - premium and remnant - achieves its best performance through the exchange model.

The Publisher Ad Trader

A large site’s display inventory will be managed by the Ad Trader who will not just offer the inventory for sale on the exchange or send it off to yield optimization companies like AdMeld, Rubicon Project or Pubmatic as publishers do today.

In the future, many of the rapidly evolving tools from these optimizers will be placed in the hands of a site’s trader or trading team enabling enhanced optimization and segmentation of inventory by leveraging trading tools with a publisher’s own proprietary data - such as registration or behavioral data - and increase the value (CPMs go up or stabilize!) to advertisers of inventory once seen as garbage remnant, for example.

In turn, the direct response or brand advertiser’s target audience will become increasingly specific and willing to pay more for inventory as web analytics in the future prove ROI and can be directly mapped from the demand generation of a display ad campaign to the purchase of an advertiser’s products or services.

While this development is not likely to take place soon, it will be interesting to see how publishers react to the present downturn and the continuing fall in CPM rates. Will publishers put more premium inventory on the ad exchanges and look to sell more advertising through their own sales team? Might the current climate precipitate a move towards this "ad trader" model?