Coronavirus Talk #10: On Future-Proofing Your Sales Career

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

On my final Coronavirus talk, I discuss what happens post-pandemic, the power of blending, and what you need to do right now to now to future-proof your sales career. The Pipe Is Life A year ago, I made the first coronavirus talk about outbound prospecting. No matter when, where, or how as a salesperson, your number one job is to go out and fill up the pipeline. A lot of people were asking questions at the outset of the coronavirus about whether or not they should prospect at all. And if we take a look at the last year, the salespeople who kept the pipeline full, crushed it, and salespeople across all industries had the year of their life because they kept prospecting. Salespeople who were prospecting by foot and in-person moved to the telephone. People that were using the telephone found that because they were working at home and not driving as much, they could double up on their prospecting compared to the year before. A year ago, prospecting consistently was the most important thing that you could do. And today, it is still the most important thing that you can do because the pipe is life. The number one reason why people fail in sales is that they fail to prospect. It's just that simple. We've been through a lot this year. But as we start looking to the future, as salespeople we've got to think, “How do we future-proof ourselves?” There's A Whole New Playing Field In Sales The one thing that is absolutely true about the last year is that we compressed about 10 years’ worth of innovation into a period of about 12 months. Salespeople everywhere woke up to a new playing field. This playing field was being driven primarily by buyers because buyers had changed. The new playing field was, “I'm not going in person, I'm going to be on a video. I've got to learn how to leverage an omnichannel approach for connecting with my customers and moving deals through my pipeline.” What top sales professionals discovered over the last year is something called blending. How To Win With Blending Blending is choosing the communication channel at any given point in the sales process that gives you the highest probability of achieving your sales outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. This is the formula for the future: choosing the communication channel that gives you the highest probability of getting the outcome that you desire, at any given place in the sales process, with any given customer, at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. Essentially, it’s efficiency + effectiveness = productivity. It’s that simple. So as you start thinking about future-proofing yourself, the number one thing you have to do is start mastering every single communication channel, whether it's direct messaging, the phone, video, email, snail mail, you name it. It's the ability to use every possible way to connect with someone. Even with social media or smoke signals if you have to. Mastering all of those channels so that you gain a competitive edge. You can meet your buyers where they are and blend these different communication channels so that you can have more conversations with people. We Can Talk To More People In Less Time If you just go back to what I said earlier, a year ago, I talked about prospecting because one of the truths about sales is that the more people you talk with, the more you're going to sell. But because we have all these different channels to use, now it makes sense that we can talk to more people in less time, which puts more in the pipeline. That means that we're going to sell a lot more in the long run. This is future-proofing. Sadly, over the last year, I've noticed that there are two basic types of salespeople. There are wishbones and there are rainmakers. The wishbones are the folks that were hoping and wishing that things would go back to the way they were. There are people right now looking at the end of the pandemic, which is in front of us and it's going to end very soon,