Show notes
Open yourself up to new opportunities
It’s difficult to see new possibilities during this crisis. It seems like we’ve been in this pandemic for years rather than months. Secretly, most of us have been living with the hope that the coronavirus pandemic would be over quickly and that we’d get back to normal.
With the new surge in cases, what is becoming clear is that everything has changed, that there is no going back, and that the only thing we can count on is new possibilities. In Coronavirus Talk #8, I discuss why it is important that you shift your mindset now so that you are looking though the windshield rather than in the rear view mirror.
Adapting to A New Reality
The last time I came to you with a Coronavirus talk, it was way back in April. We were talking about gratitude. And a lot’s happened since April.
One of the things that happened to me was that I wrote an entire book, an 85,000 word book on Virtual Selling. And it’s something that normally takes me 18 to 24 months. And I was able to focus my attention and get it done.
This is one of the lessons that I’ve learned during coronavirus. There are all these new possibilities, different things that we can do. And I’ve heard a lot of people, very smart people, talk about how, even though it seems a little bleak right now, this coronavirus pandemic is going to launch an entire new wave of innovation and it’s making a lot of us think differently.
I think I told you in a previous talk that I was rethinking in fact, a lot of my values, and it’s helped me, as a CEO, begin to transform my company, Sales Gravy, into a different company, and to grow faster.
The reason that I’m back, because I really wasn’t planning on any more coronavirus talks, is because the coronavirus is back with a fury. We’re seeing cases popping up everywhere. Now we’re shutting things down again. There’s a little bit of panic. I think we’re looking at some stiff economic headwinds if we don’t get this under control.
Everything Has Changed, Especially in Sales
And a lot of folks who were thinking that we were going to get back to normal are now faced with the truth, that there is not going to be a “back to normal.” Everything has changed and it will continue to change.
And it’s no different than what happened to us after 9/11. After 9/11, we were expecting things to go back to normal and they never really did. We’ve traveled again and we continued on with our lives, but security never changed in airports. And the way that we looked at the world, it was always jaded after that moment.
Now, I’m not saying that the coronavirus caused us to look at the world with a jaded view. I think it’s going to, like I said, open up new possibilities. And I think for all of the folks who were holding on to the hope that we will go back to normal, I think right now you’re getting a massive wake up call, in particular with salespeople.
Differentiate with Virtual Selling
Because if you’re in sales, you know that everything has changed and it is not going back. If you want to be relevant, if you want to be competitive, if you want to differentiate, you have to learn how to sell differently, which means you have to adopt new tools, which means you have to become good at virtual selling, and you have to do it now. That is a fact.
Look, I’ll admit that I was like a lot of folks. I believed that this would be over quickly. I wrote a book called Virtual Selling, expecting that it would have a short life cycle that it wouldn’t live very long because people would get back to what we were doing before and back to normal.
And now you can see, as the cases have picked up and as we are really coming to grips with the fact that we’re in this for the long haul, that the truth is, is virtual selling is the way that we’re going to move forward.
Rise to the Occasion
But here’s the good news– and we’re getting this in from everywhere across industries, the size of companies, in different countries, everywhere– we’re hearing over and over and over again about sales professionals and companies, including my company, who have had the best months, best quarters of their entire history in sales. They’re crushing records.
My company’s had three months in a row of record sales at a time when I truly believed that we would be in deep trouble. And what we’re finding is that virtual selling has made us more productive. We’re able to have more conversations, talk to more people. We’re able to accelerate sales cycles. We’re able to connect with people when we weren’t able to connect with people before, because virtual selling makes it easy.
What does this mean?
Well, it means that the coronavirus pandemic has been transformative for the sales profession. It has made us better. And salespeople everywhere are improving their skills and they’re making more money because they rose to the occasion.
This in fact is the lesson that I hope to teach you in this coronavirus talk. You have a choice, you can change your mindset and you can open yourself up to all the new possibilities. You can create a new vision for yourself. Or you can look backwards and hope that things will go back to the way they were before. You can see the world as a dark place with no hope. That’s a choice.
And if you look at the world with new eyes and you see those possibilities, you never know which one of those possibilities that you might capture, that could change everything for you and your family.
Create a Vision
So here’s my challenge to you: What I want you to do is peel away some time to just sit quietly in silence. Turn everything off, no phone or devices. It’s okay to have a pen and a piece of paper if you want to take some notes.
And I want you to sit and think about all of the possibilities for your career, for your life, for your family, for your business, even for your community, and your country. And I want you in that moment to begin the process of sketching a new vision for yourself, who you’re going to be, what you’re going to be, what makes you happy? Where do you want to go?
This is Just the Beginning
Now, this doesn’t have to be big and audacious. This can be small. It can be incremental. The exercise itself is just a starting point. It’s a beginning, it’s a shifting of your mindset. It is getting you to start looking out of the windshield to the road ahead of you versus staring in the rearview mirror and looking at what’s behind you.
And in that moment, you will begin to transform because you will see that there are tons of new possibilities that lie before you. I mentioned my brand new book, Virtual Selling, and you can pick it up right now at Amazon, iBooks, at GooglePlay, or wherever books are sold.
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