Episode #183: COVID-19 Sales University

Living in Brisbane, I would commute to and from work by car listening to audio tapes on business subjects like sales, customer service, negotiating, speaking skills, etc. Moving back to Japan in 1992, I continued commuting to work and continued to turn my vehicle into a university on wheels. It is amazing how much you can learn from listening to smart people, with rich experience and fresh ideas. In those ancient days, we didn’t have YouTube, podcasts or the internet like today. I used to buy big bulky plastic box collections of audio tapes and play them in the car while commuting or on a Walkman while I was running in the mornings.

Fast forward to lockdown city and here are all these salespeople sitting around with a swarm of irritants, difficulties, obstacles, disappointments and frustrations enveloping them. Clients are tucked up at home and not buying. Companies are having their share prices gutted, whole industries are being vanquished, unemployment levels surge as we go into mental lockdown about purchasing anything. Where is my commission when I can’t sell anything? How do I get through the long dog days of nothing to do?

It is amazing. We have over 950 videos available for free on our YouTube channel, over 800 podcasts on iTunes and over 1700 blogs on LinkedIn and it is all free. I am not alone. All the major leaders in the field of sales have tons of free content, because we are all converts to content marketing, where we offer our wares for free believing that you will eventually recognise our worth and be prepared to buy something from us. There are endless books available on all aspects of sales, there are self paced adult learning courses, there are MP3 audio programmes – the list just goes on and on.

In normal times, salespeople are too busy or too lazy to find the time to further educate themselves. Maybe they got into sales by accident and have never had the concept of investing in themselves to improve their professional abilities, because they don’t see it as a profession. This is what they do until they find a “real” job. Full mercy on the buyers who are being served by this miserable excuse for salespeople. Who wants to buy from someone who is not committed to their profession? Who wants to buy an undereducated, low motivation, going nowhere loser?

This is the time to start studying. We need to invest in ourselves to read, listen, plan, create. We have the time. In our lifetimes, this sales sabbatical will probably only come once. We should make the most of this time to really go back to the basics, to recapture what has been lost, to reimagine how we can better serve our clients. You can try and work it out by yourself. Or you can access the knowledge of someone who has already done it and done it much better than you would have ever managed.

Usually, we all scrape by with a “just in time” equivalent amount of knowledge of the industries we sell into. We don’t really devote enough time to grasping the finer details and deeper complexities of the market. We pick up intelligence on the market from our clients. We sit there with that face that wants to portray we do know what they are going through and the exigencies they are confronting, as they duke it out with their competitors. We try to second guess where the market is going even when we have no real clue where the market is today.

We can use this time to really educate ourselves on the market. Yes, it is stuck in neutral at the moment, because everything has founded on the Covid-19 shoal. However, that situation won’t last forever. What will be the issues facing our clients when they re-emerge from their respective foxholes, once the bombardment has ceased? Are we just going to return to the sales profession, as we were before this virus turned the world upside down or are we going to return more learned and more wise than before?

What about our product knowledge? It would be a rare salesperson who knows their full product line-up in depth and with mastery. This Is another ‘just in time” job, where we maintain the minimum knowledge we can get away with. What if we decided to go for the maximum knowledge possible and used this time to get it done? Now is the time to really learn the full breadth of our line up, so that we can draw on all of the resources we have available to serve our clients.

Covid-19 has driven us home, but we don’t have to allow it to drive us crazy. We can seize back the initiative and own what we do and how we do it. Studying our craft, mastering our profession makes a lot of sense. The riff raff will just idle their time away and go back to polluting the sales world making it harder for the rest of us to gain client trust. We cannot control what the pond scum do, but we can take command of what we do. So let’s go do it!