Your Future in Sales
Technology brought upon a lot of changes and improvements that would dictate your future in sales. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about the history of employment to pinpoint these changes and how they help you understand the flow that the sales industry is following. He presents five questions that will surely help guide you towards the right path and secure your position in the place where sales is at the moment and in the foreseeable future. Understand why it’s necessary to keep up with technology and improve your skills even if you have people who will do them for you. Also, learn about the impact of investing time and money in yourself in order not to get swept away by the progress of the environment.
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Your Future in Sales
I wanted to give you one more episode. I want to have you give this some thought. You’re heading into some downtime maybe at least at some point, hopefully you’ll be able to shut it down. What I want to talk about is you looking at yourself. Not just for 2021, although that seems to be the common theme, is what are you going to do next year? What are your goals? What are your plans? I want you to take a little bit longer, look at this and not look at this as what you need to do in the next 30 days, but what you need to do over the next year or two. You can get started quickly. You should, but I want to have a little bit longer view of this. If you have not checked out BillCaskey.com, lots of free resources there. If you want to get in touch with me, you are free to do so.
We’re working on putting together some programming. If you’re a CEO, president, you want me to help you with your team or if you’re an individual contributor or leader, you can get access to me on the page. I listen to a lot of podcasts. That probably is in sync with what you thought. Some podcasts are good. Some episodes are bad. It doesn’t take me long before I can figure out pretty quickly whether I want to listen to it or not. One podcast that I especially like is James Altucher. He’s quirky and funny. I like him. He has some interesting guests. He had a guest by the name of Jeff Wald who wrote a book called The End of Jobs.
Sales Future: The job tenure will continue to go downward because people are mobile and able to take new jobs.
In that podcast episode, I encourage you to listen to it, it’s about an hour long, Jeff, the author, talks about how jobs have morphed over the years. Going back couple hundred years, we had the agricultural economy where 80%, 90% of Americans and people all over the world were in agriculture. That was an hour of work for an hour of pay. There was not much mechanization there. It was all by hand. We moved into the industrial economy and the industrial revolution, mid 1800s, then we moved into what he calls the electrical economy then into the information economy. That’s where we are now, the data, the information economy.
He is suggesting that jobs will change a lot brought on and accelerated by what we went through in 2020. This trend was on aligned to happen anyway. It was accelerated by the pandemic. Two areas that he says is pretty safe, one is creative, anything that has to do with creative. It’s hard to outsource creative projects. He says outsourcing is obviously going to be a big factor. It’s not outsourcing to China and India though. It’s outsourcing outside of your company. He said, if a company wants to launch a product, the VP of marketing may not walk around the building and say, “Who’s available for this project?” He or she may say, “Who are the best five people I can get in the world or in the US or whatever economy you’re in to launch this product?”
If you aren't constantly learning how to do your job better and take on new responsibilities or skills, somebody else will take your place. Click To TweetWe will bring people in as an ad hoc team for a period of time, then disband them. That way, the company doesn’t have to pay all the overheads and long-term salaries, but they can get good people. They may pay more in the short run for those people, but they won’t be burdened with all the overhead of having a bunch of people sitting around with nothing to do. I know in most companies, that’s not the case, but sometimes if I don’t have people who can do it, I need to go outside to get it done. That was one thing that he said is going to be a dislocation and jobs of the future won’t always be you go in, you work in a cubicle and when you’re done, it’s 5:00, you clock out and you leave. It’s a 9:00 to 5:00 or 8:30 to 5:00 job. He says that’s all going to change. It’s already started to change. One thing that he brought up that I thought was interesting is he said, in 1960, what is the average duration for a job? How long will people typically work at a company?
What is your guess on that? 1960? What was the average tenure of the employee at a job? It’s five years. He says, “Do you know what the average tenure of a job is now or back then?” It was 4.2 years. He said, “This idea that it used to be that people got a job and they stayed forever.” Now we don’t do that. He said, “It’s not true. The stats and the data don’t back that up. The tenure has gone down, but it hasn’t gone down that much.” His point there is that the job tenure will continue to go downward because people are mobile. They will be able to take new jobs now. They don’t want to move, but they don’t have to move because a lot of jobs are going virtual. He says that number will continue to go down the average tenure or duration of a job.
The other thing he said is a couple of jobs cannot be outsourced. One is sales and one is anything creative. That’s good news for those of us who are in the sales profession or who train and coach salespeople. I was enthused about that. He talked about though that the role of sales will change. He didn’t get into a lot of that. I want to get into this a little bit now, but he said the roles of all these jobs you’re going to change. It used to be that when you had a creative person and you wanted to hire somebody or bring them on for a project, you bring them into the office. You’d sit in a room. You’d document everything. That’s not happening. It probably won’t because the creative may not be proximate to the company, may not be down the hall or down the road. It may be across four states. If you find a creative person who is good at what they do, what difference does it make where they are?
That’s the creative side, back to sales. As I look at sales and the people that I work with, the companies and the individuals, I do see a lot of changes coming. I want to give you five things. I wouldn’t even call them skills, although they could be, there are some skills underneath each one, but things that you’re going to need to prepare for as a sales professional or as a customer acquisition professional, anybody who is in the game, VP of sales, CEO, entrepreneur, president of attracting clients and keeping clients, what skills will you need? What areas of focus will you need to be better at in order to do that? I’m going to go through these one at a time. I’ve got five. This is not an exhaustive list. I want to give you some things to think about here and then you have to grade yourself if it got any improvement in that. “Do I need coaching there? Do I need to buy a course in that?”
Sales Future: The way you learn how to write is to write, and the only way to improve at it is to keep doing it. The better writer you are, the better communicator you are.
Number one is lifelong learning. A lot of people talk about that. It’s a phrase that’s thrown around a lot, but he said we have to get serious about it. If you aren’t constantly learning how to do your job better, do different parts of it better, take on new responsibilities, get better at marketing or whatever the skills are that you need to be better at, somebody else will be there to take your place. Tenure is not going to matter as much. The question is, are you the best person to do the job? My question to you is, are you a lifelong learner? The way I would ask that is how much money do you invest in yourself each year? Do you take a percentage of your income and throw it back into you? You should. I know I do.
A lot of people that I see who are successful have think nothing of investing 5% to 10% of their income every year, whether it be online classes, small group coaching or one-to-one coaching like we do, taking a class at a community college. I’ve got a client who is about 55 years old who thought he was pretty good at technology, but he felt like things were passing him by, so he went out and hired a 28-year-old friend of his daughter’s. They went to college together. He was in the tech business. He brought him in and spent a few hours with my client and spent $300 or $400 on this. He had a long list of things that he wanted to learn how to do.
Never count on somebody else to market you like you can market yourself. Click To TweetThis young man taught him, from scratch, how to edit and record audio, how to record and edit video, how to set up a simple webpage or a website. He had 4 or 5 things that he wanted done. After those 3 or 4 hours, he knew how to do those things. You say, “He’s the CEO. What does he need to be building webpages for?” He won’t be building web pages, but he needs to know how it works. He needs to know how easy it is to record an edit video because when someone comes to him in the company and says, “I don’t have time to record and edit video.” He can say, “I learned in an hour. I’ll teach you in fifteen minutes. How to do it, still got that time as an excuse?” How much of your income is going back into yourself? Are you a lifelong learner? I don’t mean picking up books, although that’s not bad. I don’t mean consuming mass quantities of podcasts. I mean learning something. I’m going to give you 3 or 4 things here that you can apply to that. Learning something that’s going to be valuable for you in your business going forward.
Number two skill is video. Anything that has to do with video, shooting video, writing the script for the video, editing it, uploading it. I know you may have people that do that for you, which is fine, but you need to understand how to craft and produce good video. You don’t have to learn how to do a documentary if you don’t want, but you need to at least learn how to do video. You need to know how YouTube works. Do you know how many billions of hours a day are watched on YouTube? It’s 1 billion, but that still seems like a lot. I can’t fathom.
I don’t know how to put that in context. It’s like when somebody says, “You know how much money he made?” It’s like you would stretch, end to end, $100 bills to the moon and back. The point is that lots of businesses are on YouTube. Here’s another interesting stat from Gallup, only 9% of small businesses have YouTube channels. You know the big guys do, but what about you? If you’re a small business, I use small business $100 million or less, or you have a territory and you’re a frontline sales professional, do you have a YouTube channel?
They’re easy to set up. Could you create a channel that has all of your videos on it, that houses them, so that when somebody says, “Tell me a little bit more about what you do.” You tell them, say, “I’ll send you a link to my YouTube channel. I’ve got a lot of videos there on some of the experiences and case studies and interviews with clients.” Number two is video. It’s a skill. There’s a lot of skills within that, but you need to be better at producing video. Stop worrying about what they look like, start producing them. You don’t have to upload them if you don’t like them, but you got to sit in front of a camera with a microphone and you’ve got to try. You’ve got to make a stab at this.
Number three, writing skills. This goes back a little bit to video, but it also goes to email, writing documentation, proposal writing. Any persuasive copy, you need to be better at. Most people don’t know how to write persuasive copy. It’s hard. Like I was telling my 2X Group, I listened to a podcast by Jerry Seinfeld. He writes an hour a day, seven days a week. An hour a day, he writes skits and things that he observes in the market and the world. He has all these little bits that he’s written over the years. He has a new book out, got 300 and some little sketches in it. He writes every day.
The guy interviewing him, Tim Ferriss said, “How did you learn to write so well?” He says, “The way I learned to write so well is I write every day.” Sometimes we can go to class, to school and do online programs, but sometimes the way you write is to write. It’s like a lot of things, the only way to learn how to do it and improve that is to keep doing it. I always believe that the better writer you are, the better communicator you are. I had a client in one of my groups at 2X Academy say that thing. He says, “Sometimes I ramble a little bit. When I write things out, I get a lot clearer, and my communication gets a lot better.” Even if you’re not a professional writer, if you don’t get called on to write copy, I still believe that writing has a lot of by-product value to you, so get good at it. That’s number three.
Sales Future: The clearer you are about your offer and the product or the service that you represent, the easier it is for somebody to say yes.
Number four, I’m going to use the term marketing here, but I don’t mean in the traditional sense of the word of pricing and promotion and graphic design. I mean more content and social media type marketing. Do you know how to generate new discussions with prospects? Do you know how to create content that causes someone to say, “Phil does that? I need that. I need to talk to Phil.” If you’re not doing that, people never know you even exist. If you have a client base of 100 clients and a territory, of course they know you exist, but are you creating something that you can post on social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or whatever platform, people see it, share it, consume it and reach out to you. Social media/marketing is going to be a critical area for sales professionals in the future.
I know some of you say, “I’ve got somebody that does that.” Maybe, but they probably don’t do it in the voice that is your voice. Anything you can do to get some more reps in at social media marketing, you can listen. There’s a good podcast called Social Media Marketing. It’s Michael Stelzner. Listen to podcasts. Learn the basics of marketing now. Never count on somebody else to market you like you can market you. You can have somebody at your company who is a marketing director. They might be marketing the brand of the company, but who’s marketing you? Probably nobody.
You’ve got to be more attuned to that. Sometimes the way you have to look at yourself when it comes to personal brand marketing is you have to get outside yourself a little bit and say, “If I’m representing Bill Caskey and I’m his marketing person, how am I going to market Bill?” You have to get outside of yourself because you’re humble and you feel a little self-conscious about putting your stuff out there. You can’t. There’s a way to do it so you don’t look weird, but you’ve got to learn how to market yourself and how to brand yourself.
Number five, I believe we’ve all got to get better at this concept of packaging. Whether we’re packaging an assessment and selling an upfront assessment to prospects, whether we’re packaging an offer of some kind like, “If you work with me, here’s what you get. Here’s what you don’t get. Here’s what’s included. Here’s how everything works.” You’ve got to become a better packager of your value. You can take that to mean a lot of different things, but let’s say you sell accounting services. You have done this in the past where you reach out to somebody and they say, “Come on in. I’m not happy with my accounting firm. I’d like to talk to you.”
At some point, you’re going to have to present an offer. “Here’s what it looks like to work with my firm. We do this and then we do this and here’s what’s included. Here’s what the promise is about what you’re going to get at the end. Here’s how we handle issues.” The clearer you are about your offer, offer I mean the offer of your value, the product that you represented, the service, the clearer you are, the easier it is for somebody to say yes, and worse or better, the harder it is for them to say no, because once they say no, they’re walking away from all that value.
What got you here won't get you there. Click To TweetI find that we all struggle with that, me included, is we’ve got to get a lot better at giving voice to our offer. The way you do that is to package it and understand packaging. I hope that helped you. Those are five. There’s more where that came from. As Wayne Gretzky’s dad, Walter, said to him, the world’s oldest and most overused cliches, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” That’s what I wanted to give you, is let’s start to look at the sales profession of where it’s going, not from where it was because what got you here won’t get you there. The question is, what demands are going to be needed for you to continue to grow your income, your power and your impact? These five skills or ideas will help you get there. Go to BillCaskey.com. I know it’s been a weird 2020 for a lot of us. It’s been good for some, not so good for others, but take some time and relax. I will see you back here and we will be talking to you then.
