Ed Wallace, and Mark Roberts. Before I turn it over to Ed and Mark, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the chat box on the lower left side of your screen. Ed and Mark will also be prompting you to answer questions via the chat box. The slide deck from today's presentation is available as a PDF in the Handouts tab of the webinar home page. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch On Demand at your convenience. And with that, I will turn it over to Ed and Mark. Good morning. Thanks, Liz. And thank you so much for having us on here. And before I introduce my friend Mark, I just want to say it's always a pleasure working with the AED and its members. And for everyone out there, hopefully some of you know me, we're here to talk today about protecting revenue and protecting relationships at a time when those are very critical things. And I have my great friend Mark Roberts. And there's a lot to Mark and a lot to his career. But I think the best way to briefly introduce him and let him make a couple of comments is I call him a sales recovery expert. So with that, Mark, become an expert for us. Well, thanks, Ed. Really looking forward to serving this community this morning. There's a lot of false beliefs out there today when it comes to sales. And what better time for us to protect our revenue by reaching out to our current customers and solidifying those relationships for today, but also building a strong foundation for tomorrow. And that's what this is about. It feels like our world's changed overnight. Everything's changed, but it's also the same. The way we reach people might be a little bit different. But what they need and what they want and the process that we should use as salespeople is pretty much the same. So I look forward to sharing some insights today and having you guys participate. Because what really makes this experience valuable is the experience of everybody that's on the call. Thank you, Mark. And to play off of what Mark just mentioned, we will be prompting you to chat in responses. As Liz mentioned, so feel free to insert a question at any time. You won't distract us. And let me get us started here. Mark mentioned what an interesting time we're in here right now. And it's a time to shift. We don't believe, despite the industry you're in, we work with health care. We work with heavy equipment. We work with insurance. We work across a lot of different industries, manufacturing, distribution. And I don't think you're ever going to sell the same way again. And the reason that I feel that way, not only from talking with so many customers and industry folks, but I think the other thing is, are your customers going to buy the same way that they bought before? And here's the thing. You could have a customer in an office building, two customers in an office building, OK? And let's say one is one kind of construction company and the other is another kind of construction company. The one construction company might be fine with you coming in the door. No problem at all. Don't even wear a mask. The state doesn't require a mask anymore. Come on in. Let's have lunch in our conference room. Like old times, right? You might have another customer in the same office complex or even in the same building. And they have two employees who don't want anyone in that office. And I think there's going to be some very interesting, not only sales shifts we have to make, but I think there's going to be a lot of HR shifts that are going to happen to accommodate a lot of the concerns of individual employees. So Mark and I talk all the time about the playing field has never been more level. How are you going to unlevel it in your favor? And I know a lot of your equipment does leveling and grading and everything. So that was a little play on words for everybody there. Very funny, Mark, right? So let's talk about successful virtual relationships. The relational capital concepts that we've shared with many of the members are still in play. And we're going to give you a virtual angle on those today. So we're going to talk about those concepts. Then Mark's going to come on and talk about skill gaps and how you, as maybe you're a sales leader on here or you're an individual salesman or salesperson on here, how are you going to identify your own skill gaps or those of your team? And then we'll wrap up with some ways that Mark suggests you can improve virtual skills, virtual relationship skills, virtual selling skills. So that's our agenda. And I'd like to start us off with a chat question. People buy from people they. And Liz, I saw a chat where one of our members can't hear us. I'm not sure if that's the case for everyone. Mark mentioned that people are going to be. No, we're streaming. I'll reach out to him. You have to hit push play to get audio. Hey, Jesse's coming through with an answer here. People buy from people they trust, right? And let's get a few more. I see people saying like, no, trust, like again. Interesting, Mark, that like is on a par with trust here. I thought trust was the most important thing. But sometimes, here comes some respects. Lots of respects coming in now. Jim came back with have confidence in. Roy says trust. Let me ask you a question. Roy says trust. Let me put up some answers for everybody. Here's our top four answers of all time. Once again, I want to engage the group one more time. I like Troy with partnership. If you had to pick one of these four, which do you think is the answer for when relationships work at the highest level? If you want to do it quickly, just type in the number. These four, which one results in relationships working at the highest level? One, two, three, or four? Let's see a few more chats come in. Which one? Pick one of these four. I see a trust, a couple of trusts. Trust come in, trust and believe from Peter. Good job. Oh, we've got some fours coming in. Diego had a four. Jeff had a four. Good work, guys. Looks like trust, though, is one of the leaders for us today. Yeah, you know, Mark, we do a lot of research into business relationships, everyone. And guess what? The reason people buy is when you get the relationship to the point where they understand that you share their goals. You understand their business almost as well as they do. They view you as a business partner. So all of the responses are totally valid. People buy from people they like, they know, they trust, they respect. We saw a bunch of different great answers coming in here. But trust takes us so far. Ultimately, when they understand that we understand their business, what they're trying to do, where their risks are to them, to using our equipment, and all that kind of stuff, that's when relationships work at the highest level. So thanks, everyone, for participating in our little warm-up survey. Mark, do you think any of this changes, though, when we're talking about virtual selling? Now, you know, the members of the AED, it's a high-contact sport. They are on the job sites. They are at the pipeline locations. They are in their customers' offices. The customers come into their branches to buy parts and to get things repaired. You know, what changes with virtual selling, Mark? Well, in some states, it's business as usual, and it might even be better than it's ever been, is what we're experiencing. And in some states, we're seeing people with challenges. You know, people are working from home for the first time. But that relationship is still absolutely critical for any kind of a virtual selling task. And I guess what changes more with virtual than live is what Ed's going to unpack here in a little bit, and that's what's called worthy intent and having some empathy. And the focus is more on understanding than to be understood. And we're going to unpack that a little bit more later on. What's interesting is, when they surveyed senior executives, 89% said that building relationships has a highly significant impact on their overall business results. And that's why we're here today. This is a skill, and there is a process to do it. What's also interesting, and you might not be aware of it, is 45% of the best relationships only work to their potential. There's a huge untapped potential that we can build if we choose to focus on building and leveraging our relationships. Mark, if I can just make a follow-up point here. Think about it, everyone. If you're like these executives, and you're not even getting 50%, are you at risk in that relationship now that things are becoming a little more virtual in different parts of the country? So I think that's probably why a lot of you dialed in today. Because if you're like these great relational capitalists who are really into relationships, and they're really important, and they think about them as their key to success, they're not getting 50%. How do they even sustain? How do you even sustain a 50% return on your relationship investment? Sorry, Mark, I just wanted to throw that in there. What's interesting is, even after we've polled senior executives about how important building relationships is today, only 24% have a formal process to do it. So why do you think that is, Ed? Well, one of the answers I hear a lot, Mark, is time. So I find that kind of paradoxical, right? Almost 90% of people think they're important. They're not getting enough out of them, but then they say they don't have enough time. So that's one of the answers, is time. And the time people, the people who study meetings and how we spend our time at work, estimate we spend about 60% of our time in meetings, about 30% on email, and that type of correspondence, and actually 10% actually closing sales. So I kind of find that interesting. A couple other reasons are technology. And technology gets in the way of us building relationships. But guess what? Now technology has to be a better channel or a better vessel for us to build our relationships. I mean, how many Zoom meetings have you done, Mark, in the last month, right? You can't even count them anymore. And they're only going to grow. And what will be interesting is, as Ed indicated earlier, how much of them are going to stay? And if we believe some of them are going to stay, how are we as salespeople going to adapt? Because we're going to have to adapt. And the good news is, sales leaders adapt. They figure it out. We actually have an assessment tool, and one of the things we assess for sales leaders is what we call the figure it out factor. They identify what's changed and they adapt to continue to give their customers great service. That's because every customer and every human being within that customer's location is different and unique. And we'll talk about ways to approach that today. A couple of data points here for you to share, Mark. Yeah, what do we know about relationships and sales? The average salesperson only spends about 32% to 34% of their time selling. And of their selling time, 15% was traveling. So for those of you who are now working from home, you just picked up 15% more of your time to engage with customers. 45% of sales in 2019 were already virtual. Back in 2015, 60% of salespeople reported that virtual sales was increasing, and 51% of sales leaders focused on improving customer retention through deeper relationships. So once again, it's not just Ed and I giving advice today. This is what the data is showing us. What do we know about relationships and sales? Well, working from home, salespeople are 13% more productive and 29% happier than working on site. So even after we're allowed to go back to work, so to speak, and a lot of the salespeople on the call today probably are in front of customers more than they are in an office, I'll bet that significant numbers of people are gonna be working from home in the future. So what skills do we need to really develop to be able to maximize our results working from home? Here's another poll question. Go ahead, Ed. I was gonna say, let's ask folks to chat in on this. What mindset and skills do salespeople really need? Let's see some chats coming in on this, Mark. We'll give everybody about 30 seconds. What mindset and skills do sales professionals, sales people need to build relationships and sell virtually? Phone skills, absolutely, thank you, Jeremy. Good writing and communication skills, absolutely. Time management, that could be a webinar all in and of itself. Discipline, we have two people saying discipline, absolutely. I personally spend a lot of time with mindset and coaching sales people, and there was a wrong mindset basically that said this is not the time to call our customers. Our customers don't want us to call. I see somebody saying CRM, empathy for your accounts. Actually, that's what you need to be leading with right now. And the mindset is how do you help your customers? We need to change some of those limiting beliefs that some of us have, and actually reach out because right now, retention is king. Listening, taking an interest in your customer's business, absolutely, that's a great answer. Be a great communicator and follow up. Mark, as I look at a lot of these responses, and hey, you guys are all doing great. Thank you so much for being so in the moment with us today. I love the line about are you listening to really understand the customer? Are you listening just so you can get your turn to talk? Right? I find that happens to me sometimes. The other thing that Eugenio had texted in, wrote in, was about a process for relationships, and we're gonna get to that a little later. That was an early question that I missed coming through the chat box here. How about this? How about being a business person masquerading as a sales rep? That's what I think our customers are looking for, Mark. Being a business person, you just happen to carry the bag for some big man, for a branch that represents a big manufacturer of some kind, a dealer that's representing one of the major equipment manufacturers. I don't wanna go mentioning one name and not mention them all, Mark, and give somebody an inappropriate plug. So Mark, how- What's interesting with that comment is, what skills do we need for virtual sales? And the group here did a fantastic job. Number one is building those virtual relationships, and there's a way to do that, and Ed's gonna help unpack that here in a little bit. Active listening. As somebody mentioned, we listen to learn as opposed to reply. One of the errors that I'm a salesperson, I've been a salesperson for 36 years, I've led sales teams, but even I struggle with at times is listening to understand and not to just reply, because we've been taught over the years how to, what we used to teach, overcome objections. Today, I teach handling objections. But qualifying skills is absolutely critical today. Having empathy, taking the time to authentically connect with people, because what people are really hungry for is that authentic human-to-human connection. Some people are feeling isolated and actually have more time to talk than they've ever had before, and Harvard just did a quick study in the last month, and one of the best ways to connect with somebody right now is picking up the phone. Virtual presentation skills. Don't get me started on how many of those funny Zoom calls I've been on where somebody didn't understand that the camera was on or how to use the camera. Working remotely, interesting. Only 41% of current salespeople have the skill and the discipline, which somebody mentioned earlier, to work remotely. So that's a training opportunity. That's an opportunity to upskill people and help them be successful when they're working from home, and then what the group pretty much all agreed on was build trust and early throughout the entire process. Every time you engage with a customer is an opportunity to exchange value. You know, in one of the pieces of research I did a while back, Mark, there was a study done by the Great Places to Work Institute and that's one of these organizations that helps a company become a great place to work. I think you've seen signs in maybe your customers' offices, everybody's seen those, and one of the things they found in studying business interactions, they came out with a research piece that the summary was there are no trust-neutral interactions and I found that a really interesting piece of data. So in other words, whenever we're interacting, right now, Mark, you and I are either increasing trust with the folks on the line or decreasing trust. That's what this study came back and said, and I don't know if you have a great relationship if that's always the case, but how about us maybe just carrying that around with us and realizing that this text that I send, this webinar I do today, this email, this phone call, trust has a chance to increase as well as a chance to decrease with every interaction. So when we talk about build trust early and throughout, right, I think our trust always has the spotlight on it and I just wanna make a comment. My friend Del Keffer texted in here, hey, you're always trying to leverage shared interests so you can communicate better, right? How do we find that common ground? And we're gonna touch on that here shortly, Del. I think it's my turn now, Mark. Yeah, it all starts with worthy intent and I wanna share a story with everybody. A few of you have heard this story before, so hopefully you won't mind hearing it again, but I think the message, especially today, is as to how to find a silver lining and how to help our customers find a silver lining in these challenging times. So on August 26, 2005, it was a Friday, and I lived in the Philly area. Mark lives in the Cleveland area, just so you know where we're from. And beautiful day. I was supposed to be out of town that day. I ran a sales team at that time and sure enough, my trip got postponed, so I was around all day on Friday. Had a great morning, no one knew I was around. I got everything done. I was going out to lunch around quarter to 12, and as I'm walking out of my office door, my landline phone rings. I had a landline phone in my office back then. And it was my wife, Laurie's, cell phone coming through, so of course I ran to the phone and picked it right up. And she said, hey, I'm a little further out. I'm doing some shopping. Can you run over to our friend's house? Our youngest son, Grant, who was eight years old at the time, he fell and he's a little upset and I want somebody to get there as soon as they can. I'm like, sure, so I head out the door. I start driving down the road. It's about 20 minutes to our friend's house. And about halfway there, my cell phone in my car rings and Laurie again is on the line and this time she's very upset. Now she was a level one certified trauma center nurse in an ER, in a city hospital, so it took a lot to unnerve her. And she was visibly upset coming through the phone and she said, you need to get to the community college in our town. Grant is not responsive and he is gonna be medevaced to Children's Hospital, which is our main hospital here. So you can imagine how heavy my foot got going the next 10 minutes to get to this community college. As I pull into the community college, it's back in the woods and I'm going over all these speed bumps a lot faster than I should. And sure enough, I get to a clearing and there's a giant parking lot there and there's a helicopter with the medical logo on it with the rotors kind of slowly turning. There's a police car, there's an ambulance, there's people gathered around and then there's the big ambulance bus with a little blonde kid in a gurney with the blocks on his head, just like you see when they take football players off the field. So I don't know if you could imagine what was going through my mind at that time, but it was a pretty traumatic thing. So I make my way to Grant and one of the things I remembered about Grant was his feet were very ticklish and they had his sneakers taken off and I tickled his feet and both of his legs moved. So I got a little bit of solace and okay, check that box, that seems okay. The next thing you know, Laurie gets there and the pilot comes over and he goes, we gotta go. Gathers her up, they gather up the gurney and they put both of them on the helicopter and they are speeding off now to the children's hospital and that is the actual helipad where Laurie and Grant landed that day. They got there in four minutes. It took our older son Brett and I, who had been with Laurie, an hour to get to that same hospital. And there's a Friday afternoon in Philly in the summertime when everybody's at the Jersey Shore trying to get there, so there's a lot of traffic. So we get to the parking garage, of course we have to go to the top and now we have to go down an elevator to get to this giant atrium, which you can, you know, there's a big atrium where all those colors are on the building and then you gotta go down to the bottom of the atrium to finally get to where you can actually disperse into the hospital. As we get off the bottom step in this giant atrium with all these people around, there's a person dressed officially, a lady and she has a lanyard on, she comes over, she introduced herself and she said, I'm so-and-so, I'm here to take you to where we take our helicopter kids and I want you to know that Grant is stable. And that little gesture and that comment, that warm comment, it completely took the edge off for me and I didn't think about it until Grant recovered, by the way, Grant is fine today, that's his first college baseball pitch a few years ago, but the whole concept of what the health system did helped me come up with, I called it worthy intent and I did not create the term worthy intent, but it really rang true in my mind that day and I put this definition on that, I did do that, it's always putting the other person first and I'm not suggesting that we don't do that, but if you think, let's go back to the health system, there's hundreds of families coming into that hospital every single day, it's one of the busiest in the country, this family whose child came in on a helicopter, I'm sure there's five or 10 helicopter kids coming in that day, unfortunately, but they had the good intentions to send someone to find us and to kind of make the traumatic situation a little better for us. So it's not about the hospital having worthy intent, it's not about you all having worthy intent, I'm gonna throw something out here to everybody, worthy intent is basically Greensby's, it's our table stakes, we've got to approach our customers with good intentions, they have to be sincere, this is what worthy intent is really about, it's actually identifying the behavior from the customer that validates these good intentions. So if the health system ever looked back on the Wallace's after all this was over, they would have noticed that our kids were now going to CHOP doctors, they call it Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, CHOP doctors, so they were switched to that health system, we referred to CHOP health system all the time, what's the best way to know you have a great customer when they refer you, right? And then finally, whenever there's donations, we donate it to the health system. So it's not about whether you have good intentions, are you seeing the customers and now virtually, how can customers validate your good intentions for you now virtually? Well, hopefully they keep buying stuff, right? But how about maybe when you're on the phone, there's more rapport going on, or the call gets extended or the Zoom or whatever you're using, time gets extended, they start sharing with you ways they want to work with you in the future, now that we're in this new abnormal as I like to call it, they share their strategies with you, they co-create ways for you to get out into the field and work with their crews. Those are the kind of things that will validate the fact that they get your good intentions and that you're aligned with their goals. So it all starts with this undying principle that we call worthy intent. And it's really about the response you get around that. So if we can keep that principle in mind, that applies to any kind of relationship virtual, it's the rock solid principle that I'd like you all to keep in mind. Then how do we, when we get started, okay, so now you're dealing with a new customer. All right, let's start with a new customer. There's a theory called warmth and competence. And warmth and competence is all about when we first approach someone, what's their reaction to us? And again, we communicate six or seven different ways with customers. One of the ways is in person. The other five, six ways are actually remote. So we've been doing this all along. And guess what? Our customers still have baked into them just like we do what happened centuries ago. For instance, I should say thousands of years ago. So let's pretend that's me. And I'm with my family. And we're in the forest. And here comes Mark and he looks like that except Mark's a little more menacing. And Mark is also more menacing because he's carrying a club in his hands. My survival instinct at the time was to determine what Mark's intentions were towards me. Is he friend or foe? Is he coming at me from a warmth standpoint? We're gonna, we're going to team up and slay a saber to tiger or something, right? Or, and I didn't care how competent he was with the club. I just knew he had a club. Well, believe it or not, there's a professor at Princeton now, Dr. Susan Fisk. And she's continued to study on this survival instinct. And it's been going on for like 60 years across 36 countries. And what they determined was we still have this same survival instinct built into us as do our customers when we approach them. What are Ed's intentions towards me? I'll use my friend Del who's on here. What are Del's intentions towards me? Friend or foe? And the best way for the customer to get a feeling about our intentions is to lead with warmth. And I'll share some warmth behaviors here shortly. You know, so a study always comes up with a matrix, right? And this study came out with, hey, these are the emotions and behaviors we get back. So think about worthy intent. Well, what are we getting back when we're warm and competent? And I will hear, if I ask you about warm and competent people, I get a lot of spiritual leaders, religious figures. I'll get someone like Ellen from the TV show she's got. I get those type people for warm and competent. When we talk about cold and competent, we don't get the same emotions and behaviors. So again, one of the people that gets identified in the surveys that is a good example of cold and competent is Tiger Woods. And, you know, I think Tiger has changed over the years, and I think he's trying to become more warm, and he has become more warm. But, you know, if you think about Tiger 10 years ago, he was really competent. He still is, but he was kind of cold with people. I won't identify people in these other categories. We probably, you know, warm is great. People, everybody likes us, but they're not gonna work with us. And then cold and incompetent, they're gonna reject us. So we wanna try to be warm and competent, but remember, we always wanna lead with warmth. And here, again, Liz is gonna send everybody the PowerPoint when we're finished. Here are the dimensions of warmth and competence. And I'm not gonna ask you to do this in a chat or anything, but when you get this from us later, I'd like you to look through these and see which of the three you typically exhibit. And the little test I usually ask you to take is if you can only pick three of these 12, which three would you pick? And you can't pick three in the same column, right? So you have to pick either too warm or too competent and one of the other column. And I think it'll tell you something about yourself because if you have two competent and one warm, which could be fine for ongoing interactions with a customer, but the warmth and competence people say we should always lead with warmth. And then we have those customers that just want you to get to what you're there to talk about, that's fine. Then you can go forward with your explanation of how the equipment works or it's runtime or all those kinds of things you guys know everything about. So we want to consider the principle of worthy intent. Again, it comes through whether we're virtual or we're in person. And whenever we're virtual or in person, we always wanna lead with warmth. What is this? I'm sorry, Mark, are you gonna say something? No, go ahead. Okay, Mark and I go back and forth sometimes during our webinars. So I thought he might be making a comment. I'm gonna pull Mark in here. There's three qualities of relational capital. In fact, Mark, I'm gonna ask a chat in here. For everybody on the chat line, can you chat in what you think credibility is? If you were a dictionary and you were telling us what credibility is, let's take 30 seconds and define credibility. What makes us credible? What is credibility? Because when we build relationships, there's three qualities. The first one's credibility. And I'm gonna mention it. I won't mention the second one yet because that might give away some of your answers. Hey, look at John, creativity, nice. Knowing your customer's virtual communication. David's getting it. David's getting it, Mark. You know, Roy, doing what you say. These are awesome answers, wow. Gary says, do what you say you're gonna do. Being trustworthy, Chuck, good job. I can't mention everybody. You're chatting in so fast. Paul says, know what you're talking about. That's great. I recognize a lot of names on here, so it's great to see some friends on here. So, you know, here's the thing. If you looked up, again, a lot of you said trust, right? A lot of you said integrity. But if you looked up the definition of credibility, it's the power to elicit belief. And the word power is in that statement, the power to elicit belief. Are we asking our customers questions that make us believable? Are we creating a virtual environment for them where they feel like, hey, you know what? I can work with this guy virtually. That's the thing about credibility because it's a one-way relationship and all the trust responses can't happen until we're deemed believable because they can't really trust our LinkedIn profile. They can't really trust our emails when we haven't really engaged with them yet. So when we start working together, that's when it becomes a two-way relationship. And then ultimately, the third quality is authenticity. And I always like to say, be yourself, everybody else is taken. Mark, wanna make any comments on how these qualities work virtually? Well, and again, more important than ever before, we have to authentically be ourselves. If you're working from a script, or let me just flip it another way, how many times have you received a phone call where somebody is reading from a script? Well, how does that make you feel? Do you feel warm? Do you feel that they have worthy intent? Or are they trying to make a sale? Today, more than ever, we need to demonstrate our credibility by just the nature of the questions that we use. Authenticity, be yourself. If your company has value propositions that they want you to use, make sure that, first of all, the way their phrase resonates with the people that you're speaking with, but also that you feel comfortable saying it. Modify them so it sounds authentic, it sounds like you care, it sounds like you're there to serve them. And then integrity once again, that's doing what you say you're going to do, even when nobody's looking. There you go, that's private integrity. And you know, it's funny, I was on a Zoom meeting with a customer last week, Mark, and I heard her baby in the background, and she had just had this baby, and I could tell she was, I said, I said Janice, can I see the baby? And she said, you sure? I'm like, yeah, let me see the baby. So for the next 45 minutes, she held little Everett on her lap, and he was smiling at the camera, and you know, we're working, a lot of us from our homes now, the dog is going to bark, one of our kids is going to make noise in the background. I think it's one of the easiest ways to be authentic now, is to bring that into the conversation, rather than try to cover it up or apologize for it. So again, you know, we're talking virtually, you know, I think, you know, authenticity can happen virtually, we don't have to be shaking hands to be authentic. So we've got these three qualities that create relational capital, people, and money, and they work no matter what way we're trying to engage. We've got this rock-solid principle of worthy intent, and then we have this way to engage people in a warm way. So when we're engaging them, you know, how do we gather the information we need to really make an investment in the relationship? And some of you have heard my concept of locating the person's relational GPS, and that's, you know, just like a GPS system, you know, evolves, and we've gone from maps all the way to our phones, you know, GPS systems are the roadmap to travel success. The universal framework for all business relationships is what we call relational GPS. Understanding the business and personal goals, the passions or causes, things people care deeply about, and or the struggles. And, you know, the more GPS we learn, the more relational capital we build, and we all know the better relationship, the better chance we have to do some stuff together. So think about this, you know, some GPS questions for right now, you know, tell me what's going on, tell me how all this is impacting your business. Very easy question to ask, and how do you think this is going to make you change when we come out of it? How much are you going to change? And then the next question is, how should our interactions change? Really simple questions, that to get it may be their struggles, and what they might be trying to accomplish now in their business. And I have three examples here of GPS of a customer, growing business, they're trying to grow their business. I don't know now, hopefully they can sustain their business, hopefully they might be able to grow. They like to travel, well guess what? I mean, this was their GPS a month ago. What do we do now? When no one can travel, how do we engage them around? Hey, how you interacting with you with your family now? I know you have family in Europe, etc. And what are you going to do now? I mean, when some of the folks that got laid off go somewhere else, when this all ends, where are you going to find the skills you need? So any of this can be tailored for the current situation. You know, I always like to say, relational GPS is making an investment in the relationship. LinkedIn is just knowing about someone, it's really not getting to know them as well as you can. And a little quiz for everybody here, if I asked you to write down the goals, passions, and struggles of one of your customers that you learned the last 10 days or so, could you do that? In fact, if I asked you to write down the GPS, the goals, passions, and struggles for your top five customers, my guess is you probably, based on all the GPS quizzes I've given over the years, you probably couldn't name all three elements for all five customers. So let's go learn some GPS. And then finally, Eugenio asked about a process earlier, and then I'm going to turn this back to Mark for some virtual selling skills within this process. We have a process called the relational ladder, and it takes you from acquaintances, right, everybody starts off trying to find something in common, just like Dell had mentioned earlier, to the peer dimension where we're, you know, we're credible now, now we're doing stuff together, we're working as business partners, our time together is spent very effectively, whether it be virtually or in person, and hopefully it'll be in person again in the not-too-distant future. We're able to offer help that they take, and they take us serious with that, and ultimately we can ask them for help. Those are the dimensions of the ladder, and those are the five steps of a business relationship. We find something in common, we get out of the acquaintance dimension, we do a lot of work together, we become peers. Notice how tall the peer dimension is there. That's where you're a business person working with a business person. You're not a sales rep working with a business person. And ultimately, we become advisors to our customers. They come to us with questions about the industry, they come to us with questions about decisions they're trying to make. When you see yourself in those scenarios, all the qualities we talked about today, the principle of worthy intent, locating GPS, all come to fruition as we go up to the top of this relational ladder. And that's where we come up with what we call a business relationship that lasts. And then finally, at the very top of the ladder, we build these deposits of virtual and proximate relational capital, and they result in the following. They take us from transactional interactions to outstanding long-term interactions. And I don't think there's anything listed there. I won't read them all to everybody, but you know, these are things we're looking for. These are things that validate our good intentions. These are things that validate our integrity, validate our credibility. People generally like us because we're authentic. And by the way, this industry is one of the most authentic industries Mark and I get to work with. All right, Mark, now it's your turn. I can take a breath. So based on everything we've talked about today, this is where we want participation again. Please use the chat box. How many of you feel certain your team can create virtual relationships? Just put in a Y for yes, an N for no, or maybe a question mark. I'm still not sure. Do you feel your team is ready and trained to do virtual relationships? There's Chuck. He says yes. Awesome. Yes, yes. Some people don't know. That's okay. We have one person that, you know, was authentically honest and said no, we're not ready yet. 50-50. 50-50, 50-50. Well, if your answer to that was I don't know, that is actually one of the most common answers. You know, when people have done studies of teams, about 14% of the teams felt very confident that their teams could create virtual relationships. It's a little bit different than face-to-face. You're not having, unless you have your camera on, you're not having that body language. I see somebody even wrote in maybe 70-30%. But let's move on, Ed. What we have to do, though, is if you don't feel comfortable, we need to identify what those skills gaps are and what is the process. If we had to lock it down to build virtual relationship skills, first we need to find out, do you have relationship building skills? It might shock you that 50% of salespeople today have never been trained in sales skills. They've been trained in the product that they sell, the application, but they haven't been trained in sales skills. So if they don't have relationship building skills, it doesn't mean that they can't. They just need to be trained. We need to assess the skills of your sales team. Do they have the skills to work remotely? The tool that we use has assessed over 2 million salespeople globally for the last 30 years. And again, it's very interesting that only 41% can have the discipline and are wired to work remotely today. It doesn't mean the rest can't. They just have a skills gap. The other question to ask is, how do your buyers want and need to be served today? That would be a great question as you work on your retention and getting close to those top 20% of your customers that represent about 80% of your profits. Once we identify what some of the gaps are, we design a modern learning program to grow those skills and close those gaps strategically. And then we also, the person we always seem to forget is the manager. The sales manager also needs coaching and training and tools for leading their virtual teams. There's a lot of discussions right now on the internet for sales managers on how do you coach, inspire, and lead teams virtually. The other thing we need to do is humanize our sales call cadence. Start with, again, that empathy, taking an interest in them, showing your worthy intent. How are you doing? I can't tell you how many people have shared very personal things with me that I just knew them as an acquaintance before this all happened. How are you doing? How's your business doing? Don't assume anything. Again, it shocks me that even I struggle with that at times. I'll call somebody expecting maybe they're going to be doom and gloom, and in reality, they're saying, you know what? I'm actually seeing a little bit of an uptick. I don't want to jinx myself, but don't assume that everybody's business is struggling. Obviously, if somebody caters to the cruise industry, travel, they're going to have a difficult time right now. But then ask them, what challenges are you facing? And specifically ask, are there any new challenges that just came up? Maybe the challenge they have is a vendor that you've been trying to displace for the last five years can't ship right now. Wouldn't that be good to know? And then just sincerely ask, how can I help you? Sometimes where they need help is not something that you can help them with based on the products or services that you offer. But still, take note of what that is. What I've been doing is finding thought-leading articles and sending it to people after I've had calls with them. I can't tell you how many thank yous I get because there's nothing in it for me other than the fact that I'm showing them that I heard them. Provide value in each interaction. And that's where Ed was talking about becoming that trusted advisor. When you get to that level, that's where there's a thing called the iceberg principle. And what happens is, if you think about an iceberg, it's not the part that you see that sinks ships. But when you're in a sales transaction, the part that you see is the part that everybody sees. But when you build that trusting relationship, it's all that stuff that's going on below the surface that you now have insights in when you give your quotes. Engage authentically. You know, be a human. Human to human, interestingly, if there's one good thing coming out of this is people are really working on their human to human skills right now. And use strong dynamic visuals for each persona. If that word persona is new to you, basically it's what is it that that person, based on their role, how they make decisions. Quick story, took my family out in need of a new vehicle when we lived in Arizona. I made the mistake of bringing my entire family. So I wanted a vehicle that I could pull my bass boat. My wife wanted a vehicle big enough to take the whole neighborhood some way, place. My son wanted a little sports car and my daughter wanted something cute. Well, to the salesman's credit, he quickly understood who was the value and who had the checkbook, which was my wife. And we left with a very large SUV. But each one of those people in that call had their own persona, things that are important to them. So now is your time to really help understand what are the different personas of the decision makers and influencers at your customers. I can't encourage you enough to pick those top 20 customers that represent 80% of your net profits and get very close to them now. Get close to other people. Build what we refer to as your relationship matrix. Find other people who influence the buying decisions and get to know them now. Because when we get out of this, and we will, you will have a really strong foundation for future growth. And each persona, Mark, is going to have a different GPS, right? Absolutely. You might have the dealers on the line, right? They could have two different business owners who buy from them, who buy the same equipment from them, but each one has a different relational GPS. So to really personalize the persona, include their goals, passions, and struggles as an individual human being in that buying persona. You got a couple more pages here, Mark, about learning? Yeah, and the other thing to keep in mind is we have a challenging time. If you've decided that your team needs to improve your skills, there is a design called flipped learning. It's moving instructor-led where, you know, you've all been in these, right? Deaf by PowerPoint where somebody is the sage on the stage. But what we're doing is we're moving to the guide on the side. What flipped learning is all about is before the course, there's some prep. Maybe you read something, you watch a video, some concepts in advance. Then during the live experience, you have some, you know, content that refreshes what you just learned prior. But then there's problem-solving exercises, applications, practice, feedback, role plays. I know people have probably all just had that cringe, right? I've trained salespeople for over 35 years and everybody says, I hate role plays. Well, you know what's the best thing to improve your skills? I hate to tell you, role plays. So we can do those virtually today and, again, get ourselves to be a lot stronger as we get through this. And then after the virtual experience, there's post-lesson reinforcement and application. What I like to do with the training that I develop is actually give each trainee an assignment. Now that you've learned how to negotiate, for example, or how to build a successful relationship, I'd like you to pick who you want to build relationships with at your top account. Give us their names and what's your plan to start that relationship. And then go over it with your manager. And then in 30 days from now, report back on how you did. Because there's a thing called the learning curve, but there's also a thing called the forgetting curve. Over 90% of what you learn in a course will be forgotten in 48 hours if you don't reinforce it. So that's why a flipped classroom design is a very strong way to get new sales skills and apply them quickly so they're not forgotten. I also support your point about having the sales leaders trained as well, Mark. Yeah, because right now, one of the roles, the big roles of a sales leader today is coaching and helping people with their mindset. I can't tell you how many people in associations now are asking for the webinar I do on mindset. And there's a lot of limiting beliefs that salespeople have that simply are not true today. So one of the things a manager can do is help coach people and reframe those limiting beliefs to get them talking to their customers and using that extra 15% of time to get the maximum results. You're standing over the putt. You don't think you can make it. You're probably not going to make it. Right, Mark? Well, a good friend of mine is actually, he wrote a book, Seven Days in Utopia, and he said he's a golf mindset coach. And he said the most important part of your game is 10 seconds before you hit the ball, what are you telling yourself? If you're like me and you just grabbed your water ball because you believe it's going to end up in the water, well, guess what? That's where it's going to end up. A lot of times people say, Mark, how are we going to do training right now? Well, actually, that's a pretty strong ROI if sales skills training is done correctly. People that are top performers in the organization statistically have about a 10-point greater gross margin, almost two times greater in account retention, which, again, my advice is have a big focus on retention right now. But the next one, now that is a tangible benefit, 6.2, greater share of customer wallet. So for those of you who have key accounts and you're tasked with growing those accounts, learning skills to develop relationships and build relationships with others in that organization can result into growing your share of wallet at your key accounts. And then as far as accelerating virtual relationships, we appreciate everybody being on the call today. Everybody is going to get a free complimentary sales skill assessment, if you'd like. We have an e-book on modern sales training that you're going to get a copy of that I wrote, special value on accelerated virtual relationships. It's a virtual training experience that's very similar to that flipped classroom design where you watch videos on how to build relationships. You spend time in a virtual live presentation with Ed, the author of the book, and then you go off and you have some application exercises, you create your relationship plans, and you also watch additional videos. And if you're interested in pursuing any of that, we highly recommend you engage with John White, pictured here, and that's his email and phone number. And again, you know, just because we can't be in a classroom doesn't mean we can't all get stronger. We all have a little bit more time today, and today is the day that we need to build for the future. Anything else you'd like to add, Ed? I just want to thank you, Mark, for sharing your wisdom today. It's always a pleasure getting to work with you. I'm going to open up. We have a couple of minutes left. We got a bunch of questions throughout. I think we addressed as many as we could. Does anyone have any closing questions as we wrap up and turn it back to Liz? I'll give you about 15 seconds or so, or 30 seconds to type in. See if anything comes across, Mark. We can address that. And in the slide deck that everybody's going to get, there's information on how to get a hold of that, how to get a hold of me. I'm very active on LinkedIn. If you want to connect with me, just say, you know, I met you on the presentation today, and I'll accept your invite. You know, as a community of salespeople, we're going to get through this. And what we're always tasked to do, I don't know if you've heard it, is just make it happen. Well, the way we're going to just make it happen with this challenge and when we get through this challenge is by working together and growing and improving our skills and pivoting where we need to pivot. Thanks, Mark. Liz, do you want to close us out, please? Sure. Just thank you, gentlemen, for presenting this morning. We really appreciate it. And as a reminder, the recording of this will be available later today. The slide deck is available in the LMS. And if you have any questions or any other comments, concerns, please feel free to reach out to Ed there directly. So thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Liz. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.

virtual relationships

selling skills

face-to-face interactions

relational capital

sales teams

working remotely

relational GPS

business relationships

sales training