What do you reckon – is sales easier or harder now than it used to be?
When I started in Xerox in 1989 we used faxes, pagers, didn’t use the internet, didn’t send emails and didn’t have mobile phones or social media. Orders were taken on paper.
Our CRM was filled out by hand on carbon paper and sent away to be manually updated and printed out – we got it back 3 weeks later. And Xerox was at the forefront of technology!
In 1995 I got given 1 of 2 laptops in my region as an experiment.
Our cutting edge £250,000 copiers did 300 dpi resolution – the industry best.
And I had a company car because I needed it.
Is it better now or worse?
The jury is out, but it is certainly different:
Now everyone in sales has a mobile device – and they are nearly a 1000 times more powerful than computers in the mid 1980s. Everyone also has a laptop or tablet and often doesn’t have a company car.
We communicate using a range of platforms: landline, mobile phone, face to face, video meetings, text message, WhatsApp, messaging across all the social media platforms, email, snail mail, radio advertising, TV advertising, adverts on social.
CRMs are sophisticated, powerful, data-driven and provide instant analysis. We communicate internally using tools like Teams, Slack, Monday.
Research is so easy now – at the press of a button, Google can find it or it’s on LinkedIn Sales Navigator – never have we had so much information available to us.
Data is now king.
It’s easier to reach clients, yet harder than it has ever been.
So is it better or worse?
What do you think?