Technology.
It is hard to imagine our professional or personal lives without it. Your selling skills and sales motivation are likely tied in tightly with technology.
I’ll be the first to admit I like my iPhone, my laptop computer and even those technological advances that are anything but new, like voice mail, email and texting.
We even just added a new Sales Hunter app for the iPhone, and we are regularly exploring and using various video and web-based tools to share valuable information with all of you!
Technology definitely can be a friend and help us be more efficient when we sell and communicate.
It can be a foe, however, if we rely on it so much that we can’t sell without it… or if it fails when we need it most.
Two tips that will help you succeed in this regard:
1. Make sure you can remain confident and still communicate effectively should you run into a technical roadblock.
For example, if you have part of your sales presentation on PowerPoint slides or vital information you want to share with a client on your iPad, make sure you know what to do if those tools suddenly don’t work.
And by “knowing what to do” I mean that you not only can remain calm, but can also still give the customer solid information. Sure, you probably can’t give them all of the information you had intended, but you have to be able to “think on your feet” and to know enough of what you were going to share that you are not wasting the client’s time.
2. Use various methods to communicate to customers and prospects.
For example, if you over-rely on email communication, are you still comfortable talking on the phone should your email program go down or your computer crash? If you get comfortable using numerous methods — email, phone, in-person, on-line meetings — then you will be less likely to feel frustrated should you have to suddenly switch gears to a different mode of communcation.
A bonus tip — back your computer files up daily.
With how advanced computers have become, we can easily have a false sense of security that nothing drastic could happen (especially if nothing drastic has happened ever or in a very long time!)
But if your hard drive crashes or your laptop computer is stolen and you haven’t backed it up in over a year — or even in the past two months — you quickly realize the deep impact.
Before long, you realize you have lost valuable presentation information, contact lists, email addresses, notes, expense reports and so forth.
Back your computer up with a portable drive or flash drive. Or look into services that will remotely do this for you for a monthly fee. Also consider what you need to do to back up your contacts on your phone.
Certainly, some technology glitches you can’t completely protect yourself against. For example, our servers that host our website were hit by a major power outage recently. Our website and millions of others were down for literally hours! That’s eternity in internet world.
There was nothing we (or our web company) could do about it.
If you couldn’t get to our Sales Training Tip #405: What Makes a Stupid Customer? because of the site being down, I encourage you to cruise to the post now that the site is back up.
My point is that technology can be both our friend and our foe.
Just be sure that if you have made it one of your closest friends, then you know what to do if it gets grumpy and becomes a foe — even temporarily.
Your sales motivation and selling skills will thank you!
Copyright 2011, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
