Jeff Burgess Motivational Business Manager
Author

I miss the old days; old for me, anyway. As much as I was surfing that wave of technology starting in the early days of my computer career – dare I say, capitalizing on it – life was so much more honest back then.

And the only thing “instant” back then may have been Minute Rice. Conversations were face-to-face or on the rotary telephone. Sales were sealed with a handshake, not a Dropbox document.

When Business Was Built on Handshakes, Not Screens

I loved the anticipation of preparing for a meeting three days away, collecting all my materials before driving (or flying) out to meet either an existing or a potential new customer. Nothing today even resembles that. Certainly not a Zoom call!

Meeting preparation was vital as we had to anticipate all the proper collateral to bring with us. We really had to do our homework in advance, which meant we certainly had to Know Thy Customer and Know Thy Competition way before that meeting. It made no sense to fly out to Los Angeles for four hours just to ask probing questions.

Which is just what many of my business competitors did. On the contrary, I realized early on that attending that meeting after doing my homework was appreciated by the customer. It was an unspoken message that stated that I respected their time. Instantaneously, the respect was mutual.

Internet conversations will never replace human interaction. Those conversations had a pulse.

Doing Your Homework Before the Business Meeting Ever Happened

Especially those initial conversations I had while still working in the warehouse in my first job in the industry. Those were the ones that helped me realize that I could be something in this marketplace, although I didn’t know what.

What I did know was that this was the place for me, and, if anything, those interactions were what set me off on my quest to study every packing list and other paper filtering through the back-end warehouse.

I certainly couldn’t Google-search any of it, that’s for sure. Instead, I had to study each document as if it were a page in a textbook. I miss those days. It was a simpler time. Things just seemed more honest back then, with no shortcuts, unlike today. We really had to do our homework.

In hindsight, this ten-year head start proved instrumental to my business success. I’m not quite sure I could have mimicked that same success if I had started ten years later.

By then, the Internet, Dell, and Google were the talk of the town. Before them, I had built my reputation as “somebody who could find anything.” Granted, that took searching through an 8-inch-thick Dataproducts catalog, which is really all we had prior to Google.

But I especially loved it when I was getting those calls from Vendor Representatives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others, who could not find their own goods within the distribution network.

That was the door-opener that followed me wherever I landed. I was able to work with those vendor reps as references for new customers, should I need a third-party recommendation. And there was no better recommendation than that from a vendor rep, since they now had skin in the game. Had I stunk, or worse, side-sell in a competitive brand, that would have had a negative effect on the business rep as well.

Happy to report that never happened.

The Human Advantage Technology Can’t Replace

On the contrary, I built an army of fans consisting of territory sales reps nationally from various manufacturers, all because of word of mouth that I can find, or even better, fix anything.

It was such a simpler time for me. In fact, if anything, the Internet and Google made it harder for me, certainly not easier. In many ways, they took away from my value-add. But that just made me work harder. And smarter, as the Internet became my competition. It was quite a challenge to compete with a global database. But I was never concerned.

The challenge was on them, as I had the advantage of the human element. There was nothing cold about me.

I was an old-school salesperson who looked the customer in the eye, shook their hand, and closed a deal. Ever see the Internet do that?

Of course, I used Zoom and Microsoft Teams calls towards the end of my career, but only at the customer’s request. They knew I was always willing to fly or drive anywhere to meet in their offices. I liked meeting there as that was their home court, and they felt comfortable there. The more comfortable they felt, the more they loosened up.

My mission was to shut up and listen. The more the customer speaks, the more you learn.

Thanks to technology, for better or worse, sales will never be anything like it was back in the 1970s. And in many ways, that’s too bad. The Internet should have been an enhancement to face-to-face selling; never a replacement.

Everything happens for a reason – go be that reason.

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To learn about this entire journey, pick up a copy of 𝙄𝙩 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙙 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝙈𝙚: 𝙈𝙮 𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙊𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘽𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙎𝙪𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 today! Also available now in audiobook format!

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