Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: The Future of Sales

As I told a friend the other day, I learned more in the first 13 pages of this book than any other book I have read in a long time—and I’ve read a lot of good ones.

The reason I love this book so much is that it is timely. It is the perfect book for COVID-influenced sales both during and post (please let’s be able to say “post” soon).

The book had me at page three by stating the facts of what we are facing right now.

From the book:

The Linkedin State of Sales report 2020 with data from 10,000 online surveys of salespeople shows:

• Virtual selling is going mainstream: 77 percent of responders are holding more virtual meetings
• Buyers are less responsive: 44 percent of respondents anticipated a decrease in responsiveness to outreach
• Sales cycles are longer: 44 percent of respondents said buyers’ sales cycles increased
• Their responses to unsolicited emails are down by 30 percent
• Four out of five buyers prefer to have a video conferencing meeting than a phone call
• Three out of four believe that digital selling is more effective that F2F (face to face selling)

And get this:

• By 2025 (that’s three years by the way) 80 percent of interactions buyers have with salespeople will be digital. Yikes!

Now that these issues are laid out for the us, the author proceeds to advise us on what to do about these new paradigm changes.

Here are some of the things we are going to have to do to sell successfully in the future (translated: right now).

• All companies will need to have a well-planned, well written, and effective digital sales strategy
• We will have to change the way we sell from being seller-centric to buyer-centric and allocate the right resources for this, including going from analog to hyper automatic digital marketing
• Companies have to position themselves as industry leaders and experts in their field using content to emphasize that to their customers. Customers now want to buy from experts, and we need to make sure we are those experts. The most effective way to do this is through smart digital marketing
• More of the sales process will be done digitally. This not just buying books on Amazon or buying plane tickets from Expedia. This is through technical webinars, e-books, and online demos

We had already started to see some of these things happening before the pandemic, and now it has accelerated these changes at double speed.

It’s a little bit scary, isn’t it? But the good news is that we have this book to help guide us through these new changes in the way we sell. You’d be a fool not to pick this book up, read it, and pass it around before another day goes by.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.

The Future of Sales: The 26 Techniques, Tools, and Processes Used by Elite Salespeople

Author: By John Asher

Copyright: 2022

Publisher: By Simple Truths, a division of Sourcebooks and part of the Ignite Reads Series

Price: $16.99 Hardcover

Pages: 98 pages (I love that!)