by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
To the right of me is Erik he is sitting with a A4 iPad and notes. It never ceases to amaze me this technology thing. Erik is using a “Apple pencil stylus” to make notes on this iPad.
For some of you this isn’t new, you may use this already. For some of us, the taking of notes with an “Apple stylus” is a wonder. You can write notes, draw diagrams and colour these in.
I remember, when I was given my first laptop. It would have been sometime circa 1985. I know this as it had an Intel 386 chip.
Why was that moment important?
It was the day, that as a salesperson I was told I was going to have to do my own typing.
Up until that day, we had a Sales Administrator that did all the typing for you.
50% of the sales people said “I’m a salesperson, I don’t type, when will I have time to sit in front of customers?” Our Sales manager said “If you want to carry on working here, you will start typing. Why? Because there is nobody else here to do it for you!”
We lost 25% of the salesforce in 3 months and the other 25% grudgingly came on board.
It was at that point in my sales career, I decided that I needed to embrace new “stuff”, because sales is forever changing and growing. And if you hear anybody say “sales hasn’t changed”, they surely haven’t been around the last 20 years.
Going back to Erik with his iPad, I was lucky enough to work with a visionary sales VP who told us “we are running the business on iPads”. The iPad had just come out and it was actually a reasonable request. I struggled, I’m a big note book and pen note taker. Probably that I grew up with this and I found I remember things better if I take notes. Then I realised this was like a “386 Laptop” moment, I needed to stop making excuses and get with the program.
(Or maybe it was the Sales VP called me out in a meeting for being a luddite and I was made to look an idiot in front of the rest of the team. 🙂 )
Sales has changed, we all know that but, it was an interesting comment from Christoph (one of Erik’s colleagues) which was, “has sales changed?”.
I would argue it hasn’t, but there again it has.
All I do on social, is do everything I did in an analogue world, but now I’m able to do it, quicker.
Want to get to a CEO? No problem. But I don’t have to research a telephone number and try and get through the various gatekeepers. I also don’t have to do this during the day, in fact I can contact CEOs on Saturday afternoon.
All that aggro about calling, being rejected, calling leaving voice mails, calling being rejected, calling being rejected, etc, etc. I now go straight to the CEO on social. This is, by far the simplest and most efficient way of prospecting.
Let me stop a second and say. Let’s not forget you need a personal brand, you need a network and you need content (like this) and then you can reach out to CEO after CEO in a non spammy way. You cannot do that with cold calling. Or let’s put it another way, you can do it with cold calling, but there is a more efficient and effective way.
So has sales changed? Of course it has, so why don’t you jump in and get more leads and meetings quicker.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/why-corporate-content-is-like-picking-your-nose-in-public/
https://dlaignite.com/how-to-make-the-most-of-your-content-on-linkedin/
https://dlaignite.com/why-social-selling-training-over-webinars-is-for-losers/
