If you don’t meet customers and prospects in person, you’re probably groping in the dark about important details.
Sometimes hearing a new phrase to describe something I’m already familiar with helps reveal the deep meaning of an idea. A recent conversation with a client awakened me to a phenomenon that I knew happened but couldn’t pinpoint. The chat took place at a recent meeting. During a break between sessions, I started a casual conversation which, predictably, ended up on Covid.
The most significant impact of the pandemic on our sales efforts, my client said, is this: “Salespeople have lost their eyes.”
That was a phrase I had never heard before. I asked for an explanation and immediately recognized the problem.
Before Covid, the life of a salesperson included an expected amount of face-to-face time with customers that now seems incomprehensible.
Before we used screens for every meeting, our people were in the field. All day every day. We have been to our customers’ factories and warehouses. We could detect empty or overcrowded parking spaces. We could see which competitor had also entered the log book at reception. We could look into offices and cubicles and read body language to determine which person in the organization was actually making decisions; the actual chain of command, not what was suggested by mere titles.
Now all that is lost, or seems to be.
Certainly, much good has come out of this change. I used to leave home on Monday mornings and travel across the country for two to four days to visit clients and only see my family on the weekends. Obviously not everything about this life was healthy. But we swung to the other side so violently that, as my client said, we lost something important that we used to have.
The question now is how do we get it back? Or at least enough of it to thrive?
Before 2020 I did almost all my business personally. Yes, we had conference calls. But there has almost never been an instance where I haven’t seen a customer during a sales cycle. In some cases I saw them up to a dozen times.
These relationships now feel much more transactional. On the hour, everyone you speak to usually has another call to join. Today’s customers are downright surprised when they ask in person at any time.
I was recently invited to dinner with a client and realized that this would be the first casual meeting of its kind in three years. That is amazing. I’m glad to have it on the schedule – because I know we lost something.
For example, one of the things I used to take for granted: those casual conversations that happen in the cracks between official meetings. Waiting together for a cab or walking down a busy sidewalk on your way to lunch. So much can be gleaned from these impromptu conversations. They have been and still are irreplaceable when it comes to establishing rapport and, more importantly, learning valuable information. They only happened because the people I was with were comfortable, and those people were comfortable because I was with them personally.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. When you’re a personal wealth advisor, what little time you might spend with a client is spent very differently than when you’re selling medical supplies.
But in both cases, the answer must include some face-to-face time. Maybe it doesn’t compare to what we had in the pre-pandemic era. That’s fine – it’s understandable that our clients, like us, would enjoy a time of work when not everyone has to be in the office or on the go all the time.
Getting your eyes back or seeing for the first time will be a slow process. It’s about maximizing the limited time that clients and customers give you.
As a chief sales officer put it bluntly to me recently, the companies that win will be the ones that learn to make better use of their time than others. Because this manager, like many others, knows that we will probably never be taken back to when it seemed we had all the time in the world.
follow me Twitter or LinkedIn. Cash my website.
