Running a sales-oriented business, I will always reflect on the era before Covid-19 and the era after Covid-19 as when I really changed my outlook on how I sold and communicated to others.
And no, it has nothing to do with one’s health and safety concerns, but purely about how valuable I’ve realized it is to have time in front of clients and potential clients. For the better part of this year, it all had to be done through Zoom calls.
First, let’s talk about my style of selling before Covid-19. I rarely used a hard close and mostly sold what we offered our clients based on results, case studies, and a formulated needs assessment. It was very much relationship selling at its finest, and I don’t want to bash it because my sales/closing/growth of annual sales increases were all pretty spectacular for a long period of time.
Most of this was done in person, and if someone told me “let me think about it,” I generally said, “okay, I will check back with you in a couple of days and see where we go from here.” It never was too aggressive and was more on the side of being as much a friend to someone as it was being a salesman. In fact, it took someone a long time to convince me that I actually was a salesperson and not more of a practitioner.
Then, Covid-19 happened and I got to watch from one month to the next a revenue drop of 55% with very little that I could do about it.
So now let’s talk about my approach to selling since we have been living with the virus. It is truly a take-no-prisoners approach, and don’t worry about saying something if you mean it, even if it costs you not to make the sale. I sell with even more conviction because I see what we do works and know how effective it would be for the other party.
I still wouldn’t classify my selling as a hard-sell, but it’s a lot more cutting to the chase of “if I can only tell this person one more thing for as long as I live, what is it going to be?”. And if they happen to tell me no, then that is just the starting point. I read a series of quotes recently from Nike in the early days that said their mission was to “be on offense all the time,” and I instantly adopted that mindset. It is with this new approach that I go into every situation thinking, what do I need to do to make this happen.
And I am absolutely amazed at how well it is working.