Thank you for joining us today, we've got a great lineup of speakers and content for you. Looks like we've got well over 125 people already logged in for this morning's conference. Before we kick things off, I do want to run over just a few housekeeping items. If you would like to ask a question, please use the Zoom Q&A feature, not the chat function. If you would like to chat back and forth with attendees, that's fine. We do recommend turning off all apps except for Zoom for an optimal experience, as well as having a strong internet connection of which you can check yours at speedtest.net. We'd also like to thank this morning's sponsor for our next session, Equipment Watch. Joining us this morning from Equipment Watch is Tom Christerson. Tom? Thanks, Phil. Well, we are honored to support the AED community and we appreciate the opportunity to introduce this session. The brave new world is selling something very near and dear to our hearts. As heavy equipment and ag dealers all across North America rely on Equipment Watch every day to provide third-party, unbiased benchmarks and insights for hundreds of thousands of models across the industry's most diverse coverage set that includes construction equipment, ag, aerial, trucks, and more. Our valuation platform allows our customers to account for adjustments like meter reads, age, location, options extras to get a precise, again, third-party, unbiased current market value and easily access all the market comps that actually power the valuation. Taking it a couple steps further, we can also provide insight into how quickly that asset will depreciate based on all its unique characteristics. Many dealers know us as Serial Number Guide, once a 10-pound book, now an iOS app that allows the user to scan a serial number plate and instantly receive a model year verification from your phone out in the yard or on a job site. Others may remember us as AED Green Book, a rental rate benchmark source that's evolved into a full suite of solutions that empower the rent versus use my own equipment decision. Beyond all that, our Custom Projects Workshop allows our customers to tie right into our robust team of industry experts and data analysts to knock out custom work. This team also publishes a monthly market report that takes a deep dive into the most popular equipment types and market trends and observations. All this in the spirit of empowering the dealer to sell more strategically and consultatively. With over 3,500 equipment-owning contractors, our customers are your customers. If you want to look at equipment data the way your customers look at equipment data, in addition to all the other benefits I just mentioned, give me a shout and we'll schedule a free demo. Contact information's right there on screen. With that, I'd like to introduce the speaker for our first session. Today, Troy Harrison. Troy's work is based on more than 25 years of excelling as an award-winning sales rep, a champion sales manager, and an in-demand speaker, trainer, and consultant, working from coast to coast and around the world. He believes that successful selling is built on a foundation of strong focus on customer needs, respect for customers' intelligence, and a willingness to create positive outcomes for everyone a salesperson encounters. This morning, Troy will teach us all how to embrace new trends in combination with time-tested fundamentals to create a strategy for future sales growth. Please welcome Troy Harrison. All right. It looks like we are having some slight technical difficulties. No worries, though. At AED, we've prepared for this. We have joining us today Marty McCormick from the AED Foundation. How's it going, Marty? Welcome to the AED Leadership Conference. Thank you, Phil. I'm happy to be here. I've been with AED and the Foundation for a few years, but this is my first leadership conference I'm attending and also our first virtual one. So happy to be here and would like to thank everyone for taking the time to be on this important call. Well, we appreciate you being our impromptu guest speaker this morning. So as we get Troy back on the line here, tell us a little bit about the things that the AED Foundation is working on. We've got well over 150 people joining us today from all over the country, and some of them may know about the AED Foundation, some of them may not. So tell us a little bit about the Foundation. Absolutely. So just a very brief history lesson. Our Foundation was started by our AED Board of Directors back in the early 90s to really address the technician shortage and to provide continuing education to our AED members. And that mission is true today. And unfortunately, the technician shortage and many of our challenges have continued. As folks know, on the ground, day to day, those challenges we're still facing and still really working very hard to address. Our key focus areas with the Foundation are accreditation. Many on the Zoom call here are probably familiar. We have industry accreditation. We have about 59 accredited college programs. And underneath the college programs, we have about 11 recognized high school programs that are teaching really the gold standard for the industry, making sure that that next generation of technician is ready to go and has the technical skills that they'll need to really succeed. Well, that's great, Marty. And honestly, we could spend all day talking about all the great things that the Foundation's doing, but we really do appreciate all the hard work that you've put in on behalf of the industry. And thanks for joining us here this morning. It looks like Troy Harrison is back. We're going to kick things off here with our regularly scheduled content. Troy, thanks for joining us this morning. Good morning. Remember that whole thing that you guys were talking about, about the reliable Internet connection? That's great advice. It really is. Make sure you have one of those. I am ready to share my screen whenever. Here we go. Alrighty. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Brave New World of Selling. I'm Troy Harrison, the sales navigator. I know that they gave me a little intro, but unfortunately, that whole reliable Internet connection piece was biting me a little bit. So welcome to my home studio in spacious Shawnee, Kansas. And today I want to talk about something I'm very, very passionate about, and that is the changes in the world of selling. Selling has changed more. And I said it even before COVID. Selling has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 100. And it's still in a state of evolution. What has happened with COVID, with the pandemic and the government reactions to it, is that it's taken those changes that were happening already, and it's put them on fast forward. So I've had a number of people ask me what I felt about the changes in selling and what was going on and where we're headed. And I said, what has really happened is that the changes that we would have seen happening in probably 2022 or 2023, we're in the middle of right now. And that's what I call the Brave New World of Selling. And fortunately, it doesn't require us to be that brave, but it does require us to be a little bit visionary. And it requires us to accept the pace of change. So let's talk about that a little bit this morning. What are some of those changes that we've seen? Well, let's talk about where we're going. Today, what we're going to talk about is number one, the five key sales trends after COVID-19 and during COVID-19, for those of you that are still mired in it, and how they affect us going forward. We're going to talk about building sales processes that matter and that help us going forward. We're going to talk about the skills and attitudes that salespeople need right now. We're going to talk about CRM and other salesperson friendly tech and emphasis on the salesperson friendly. And then we're going to talk about your customer information, because that is still your biggest tool as you go forward. So what are the five key sales trends that we're seeing coming out of COVID-19? Well, you're looking at one of them, more video activity. We all know we were supposed to be in Orlando, Florida this morning. I was supposed to be talking to you live and in person. And hopefully I've tried to simulate that a little bit in my home studio. But what has happened is a lot of sales activity and indeed business activity has transitioned to more online activity. So what's happened is that customers that we used to see face to face and by phone, we're now talking to through a Zoom call or a Google Hangout or a GoToMeeting or some other technology. The second big trend is that driven by the first trend is we're having more efficient sales calls. You know, one thing that a lot of people don't really think about is there's a lot of fluff in a typical one hour sales meeting. You know, I always look at a live face to face sales meeting. I always schedule them for about one hour because usually I could get an hour of my customer's time and they have mine. What's happened is that a lot of the fluff that used to go into those sales calls has gone away. We're not seeing as many, you know, we're not seeing as much time. I always like to say nobody's going to do a video call for 30 minutes to talk about football. What's happening is that those face to face sales calls that have transitioned to video have been stripped down to their essence. Video and telephone compress a sales conversation. If you've ever compared back to back a phone call with a customer, with a face to face call with a customer, what you'll see is that you spend a lot less time on the phone, but you end up thinking, you know, when it comes to business, I actually covered the same amount of ground. Video and phone compress sales calls because it takes all the other stuff that we talk about and just pitches them out. Number three, CRM is mandatory. We're going to take a deeper dive into CRM a little bit later. I still talk to companies and particularly in the equipment industry that don't have a good functional CRM system. Guys, I'm just going to say this, at this moment in time, if you are not using a CRM system, and let me define a CRM system, a database that stores your key customer information, your customer activity information, in other words, the sales calls and interactions you have with them, and your opportunity management information, i.e. your proposals, your quotes, that kind of thing, you are losing business to those companies that do. So it's very important, it's very vital that you have a good functioning CRM system. I'll have a recommendation for you before the program's over. Trend number four, the end of the good time Charlie. The good time Charlie is my nickname for a salesperson who only sold based on personal charisma. We buy from Charlie because Charlie's a great guy, he gives us football tickets, he plays golf with us, gives us baseball tickets, buys us lunch, buys us beer. Well, here's the thing, a lot of those sales taxes have gone away, haven't they? Can't exactly give somebody football tickets, you could, you just wouldn't still be allowed in the stadium with them. You know, you can't get sporting tickets in a lot of areas, still going out to lunch is dicey, bars are closed in many areas, so all those things that were in the toolkit of the good time Charlie have gone away. So those, and here's the thing, those guys were becoming obsolescent before COVID because customers expect more from us, customers' time is more constricted, and because of that, they really want more substantive sales interactions than just a good guy to hang out with. So what we saw in a lot of areas is that the good time Charlie sales were going down, down, down, down, because customers are still throwing them a mercy order every now and then, but they weren't really buying the big stuff from them, they're saving the big stuff for those salespeople that can solve their problems. So the good time Charlie, again, becoming obsolescent before COVID, obsolete now. And finally, agility, your ability to move and adjust and change with the times, and your salespeople's ability to move and adjust within the sales call is vital, more vital now than it ever was before. So those are the key sales trends that are going to be driving where we are and where we're going as we go into the future. And talking about those trends up front should inform us for where we're going for the rest of this presentation. So first thing I want you to understand, sales process is simple. One of our biggest challenges is the world of sales and sales management. We make sales management way too complicated. We do. We think there's so much about, you know, motivation. There's so many things that we talk about in terms of sales management that makes sales management very, very complicated. It doesn't have to be. Boil it down to its bare essentials. And this is it. The quality of the activity that your salespeople perform multiplied by the quantity of sales activity equals results. So if you are trying to troubleshoot your sales process, if you're trying to troubleshoot your salespeople, you've only got two variables to work with. How much are they doing of it and how good are they at it? And those two things multiplied together gives you whatever result that you're getting. So if you want to coach, you've got to look at one of those two variables. By the way, this goes to a lot of different areas in your companies as well. So with that underpinning, let's talk about sales process. What is a good sales performance model that we can use going forward? Now, most of the time what we're talking about is how do we grow the company or how do we grow the sales territory? COVID has affected that. I know a lot of companies out there that are really just trying to hold serve or even manage a decline in sales. But let's be optimistic and let's talk about this in terms of where we can go post-COVID. Let's talk about growth years. How do we build a sales performance model? And you can do this, by the way, for your company. You can do this for a department. You can do this all the way down to the individual sale. And however you want to build this out, it is important, though. Start with our beginning base. What result is it that we're looking for? In other words, where were we last year? Let's say that we're doing this year-to-year just to keep it simple. So let's start with last year's base. Let's say last year we did $10 million in sales. I know most equipment dealerships are bigger than that. But when I'm illustrating this, I like to use round and easy-to-use numbers. So let's say we're starting out with a $10 million company. We did $10 million in 2019. Well, that base is going to do two things as we go forward. That base is made up of customers and transactions. And those customers, that customer base, are going to do two things. Some of them are going to grow. They're going to get bigger. They're going to gain business. Maybe they got a new paving contract, or maybe they're building a new building, or maybe they're doing some new excavation. They have organic growth that doesn't have anything to do with us. But it will affect us because when they grow, they're going to need more of what we have to sell, whether that is a bulldozer, or whether it is equipment rental, or whether it is service, or whether it is parts, whatever. Their growth is going to drive our growth. We're also going to have some, unfortunately, that shrink. Our business with them shrinks. Now, that could be any number of reasons. Maybe they go out of business. Maybe they sign a national contract with somebody and have to go elsewhere. Maybe their own business shrinks. Maybe they've lost business. But there's going to be a portion of your base that grows. There's going to be a portion of your base that shrinks, at least in terms of their business with you. So when you're building out this performance model and looking at next year, it's not enough just to say, here's our base. Here's where we want to be. You've got to adjust for what that base is going to look like in your next year. Hopefully, in a lot of companies, what's going to happen is that the growth is going to offset the loss. But it doesn't always happen that way. And it's a great mental exercise to dig in and really figure out which customers are going to grow, which customers are going to shrink. That means you've got to get to know your customers, which is always a great exercise. So then you figure out what is that growth or loss going to look like. So let's say that when we figure out we've taken our $10 million company, and we know that we are going to lose 10% of that business because two of our big customers have gone out of business, or maybe they've gotten purchased by somebody who buys from somebody else, whatever. Through no fault of our own, we're going to lose $1 million of that business. The good news is that we are going to gain a half a million dollars from other customers because they're going to get bigger with us. So now we've got a $9.5 million base going forward into next year. What's our goal going to be? What do we want to be in 2020? Let's say we wanted to grow from 2019. We wanted to grow 10%. So that means $11 million. So now we've got a $1.5 million gap. $11 million here, $9.5 million here. So now we've got this $1.5 million gap that we've got to have our sales team go out and get. We've got to have the sales people go out and find enough new customers that they can find that million and a half dollars. So now we've got to figure out what is our average customer worth? What's our average new customer worth? Here's where it's a little tricky. Most of the time, and I've seen this done many, many times, most of the time when people think about adding new customers and what does that mean, they break it down to an average new customer and they say, okay, our average new customer is $100,000 a year, so we need 15 new customers. But that's not exactly true for the next year's results. Figure your customers at six months' worth of revenue, and here's why. On the average, you're only going to have those new customers for six months out of the year. Some of those new customers hopefully are going to come on in January. We're going to have a whole year with them. Some of them are going to come on December. We're only going to have a month with them. Your average is right here, six months. So figure six months' new revenue. So let's say that those new customers are in fact $100,000 a year customers. Six months' revenue is $50,000. That means instead of needing 15 customers to get our goal, we actually need 30 customers to get our goal. A little bit different conversation there, isn't it? So now we know, okay, our sales team has to go out and pick up 30 new customers. Now we get into the quantity of activity. It's very important that you have metrics for this, and I'll tell you why momentarily, but the spoiler alert is that it's the only way you can really troubleshoot sales performance. So we start out, okay, we know we need 30 customers. What's our closing ratio for proposals? Let's say it's two to one. Let's say we close every other proposal. That's a good ratio, but let's use it. So we need 30 new customers, two to one, so we know we need 60 new proposals over the course of that year to get our 30 new customers. I want to pause here for a moment, by the way. If you don't know what your ratios are, you need to do some forensic accounting and figure those out. It is vital to do this kind of a business model that you know what your ratios are. Sometimes you may just have to do an educated guess because you don't have them. But where a lot of salespeople and sales managers mess up, they don't figure their ratios step by step. They go, oh, well, I close one out of every eight prospects that I talk to or something like that. Don't do that. Back it in at each step of the sales process. By the way, the sales steps that I'm talking about are those moments where something big happens in the sales process. In other words, it's not just appointment by appointment by appointment. It's those moments where something meaningful happens in the sales process. When we propose something meaningful has happened, we have quoted a specific product for a specific price. That's a moment where the customer can make a buying decision. Without that information, they cannot make a buying decision. Identify proposals to new customer sales. Again, let's use our two-to-one ratio. We need 60 proposals. Then what's your next step back in the sales process? Maybe it's presentation or a demo. Maybe it's combined. Maybe we need to do an equipment demo. Then how many equipment demos does it take to get us a proposal? Again, you need to know this ratio. Let's say it's three-to-one. Let's say every third demo that we do results in a proposal. Now we know that we need three times 60 or 180 demos over the course of this year to get our proposals, to get our sales. Again, this is assuming that everything's done with average confidence. I always like to build my metrics around average confidence. Don't build your sales metrics around your superstars or everybody who isn't a superstar is going to fall short. This would be my advice here. By the way, I am going to call for questions as soon as I figure this slide. If some of you have some questions you're sitting on, I will have Liz go ahead and open the floor for questions here in a moment. Now, back up again because a lot of times we're going to do a needs discovery. We're going to do a questioning, a needs discovery, with our prospects that won't result in a presentation. Either we decide they're inappropriate for us, they decide they're inappropriate for us. How many needs discoveries result in a presentation? If you're doing them right, my normal ratio is about two-to-one. Again, let's use that two-to-one ratio. Now we need 180 times two or 360 needs discoveries during that year. Finally, how many prospecting calls does it take to get us a needs discovery? Work that all the way back through. Then you can divide it out by salesperson. Then I recommend you divide it out by week. I always like to manage in weekly units when I'm managing sales activity. A week's a real manageable unit. We know that we're going to review this every Monday or every Friday. When you manage by the week, you can also arrest bad trends before they really set in. When you manage by the month, a lot of times, you'll have bad habits that have set in over three or four weeks, and it becomes a real problem to change it. My recommendation is when you're looking at your metrics and building those, do that on a weekly basis. Now, again, I want to make this interactive as possible. Does anyone have any questions before we move into the next phase? Not seeing any at this time, Troy. Yeah. If you have a question, either type it into the chat box or hold your hand up and we'll get to it. Now, let's talk about the quality of activity. I'm going to keep it on this slide for a moment. Remember I said that sales management was about quantity multiplied by quality. In other words, the more you do it, the better you are, the better results you get. Let's say that we have a salesperson who isn't achieving results, but you've got these metrics in place. Here's where you can use those metrics to benefit you. Find the shortfall. In other words, let's say that we have said that every fifth prospecting call yields you a needs discovery appointment. Well, you've got your salesperson and let's say you've required 50 calls per week. Again, using round numbers. You've got a salesperson over here, Don. He's getting his 50 calls per week, but he's not getting his discovery appointments. What that tells you as a manager and a coach is that whatever he's doing on the prospecting calls isn't right, it isn't good. Now, as a coach, you can get involved and you can work with him on those prospecting calls, and that gets him to the right number of discovery appointments. Same thing on discoveries to presentations. If he's getting the right number of discovery appointments, but he's not getting the presentations, then you find out something's wrong with the discovery appointments. You can work that all the way through the sales funnel, and you can find the gap, and then as a coach, you can train and fix that gap. There's one exception to this, and I'll tell you what that exception is. At the top of the funnel, those prospecting calls, that is a measure of effort. If the salesperson isn't willing to put out the effort, there's really not a lot you can do, but even that tells you what the trouble is. If they're not hitting their numbers at the top of the funnel, that's an effort issue. And I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of patience for salespeople who aren't willing to do the work that goes in with selling. But you have to have a sales performance model. You have to have good metrics to be able to effectively manage, coach, and develop your sales team. This is a great way to build those. So the best sales teams do manage the metrics, and I encourage you to do that as well. If you don't have a performance model and metrics, build those out. So let's talk about the evolution of sales. What does the salesperson look like now and in the future? Well, number one, salespeople have to be able to solve customer problems on the spot. That's more, by the way, than just knowing the equipment. Yes, it's very, very helpful to know the equipment in order to solve problems, but you've also got to know the customer. Customer knowledge, in many cases, is your most valued asset. So if your salespeople can understand their customers, then they can overlay that with their product knowledge. Customer expectations now is that they're going to deal with a salesperson who doesn't always have to be going back to the bat cave in order to solve a customer problem. Customers nowadays expect salespeople to be able to have meaningful conversations on the spot. So that requires a smart salesperson. It requires a salesperson who is empowered. The second thing is salespeople nowadays have got to be comfortable with selling an intangible service model. You know, I started my business in 2004 as the sales navigator, and I do these training programs, I do these seminars, and I still do them, and one of the things I always hear, one of the questions I always get is, Troy, can you expound a little bit on the difference between finding a salesperson who can sell intangible stuff, insurance, consulting services, web services, that kind of thing, versus somebody who sells, and it's funny, they always use the word widgets. Here's the thing, and here is what has changed in selling. Selling product used to be all about product knowledge, features, and benefits, knowing that product backward and forward, and the reason was salespeople were the main conduit of that information to get it to the customer. In other words, when I was selling industrial supplies in the mid-90s, if my customers wanted to know about a bearing or a gearbox, I was the conduit. Now, whether I used a sales flyer or printed material, or whether I used knowledge out of my own head, I was how they received that knowledge. Nowadays, it's not that case. Some of you are probably watching this on your phones. Well, you can get on the phone and find whatever product information you want, so here's the thing, everybody's got product. Everybody can find out about that product. What that means is that no matter what you're selling, whether it is something as intangible as consulting services, or whether it is as tangible as a road grader, you have to be able, ready, and equipped to sell the intangibles that go with that. In other words, why should they buy that road grader from your dealership, as opposed to the dealership 100 miles away, or 50 miles away, or whatever? Or even if they're two different brands of road graders, they overlay the capabilities of each road grader side by side, and they're pretty similar, why should they buy it from you? Salespeople nowadays absolutely must be prepared to answer the toughest question that customers will ever ask, and that is this. Why should I buy from you? And the answer to that needs to be something other than, well, we got great service. You need to be able to articulate the values, the positives of who you are selling for in such a way that your customers buy into it. And you need to be doing that external to the machine or the product that you're selling. So the intangible sales model is huge. Next, the salesperson of nowadays has to be competent and capable in many different forms of communicating with the customer. What I mean by that is this. It used to be very simple. We'd grab the old phone, we'd pick it up, we'd call the customer, and of course, a lot of times it was desk phone with a cord, but work with me here. And that was our main method of communicating with the customer. Sometimes written letters, sometimes the drop-ins. What I have found nowadays, and I'm sure you're finding it too, is that there are so many different ways that customers can be and want to be communicated with. Still phone. Phone's still very, very important. But now you've got video apps like Zoom. You've got texting. You've got emailing. You've got certain instant messenger apps. Slack is a common one nowadays. LinkedIn messaging is big. And it's not just age dependent. One of the things, when I talk about this, a lot of people kind of fall back and they say, well, yeah, Troy, but I understand why I'm talking to a younger person. I need to be good at text. That's not entirely true. I have a client who has been doing business with me now for 14 years, working for three different companies. We met. This guy has spent a lot of money with me in 14 years. If I called him every hour on the hour today, I might get an answer tomorrow, or yeah, maybe Monday or Tuesday he might bother to call me back. Probably not. If I emailed him, same thing. If I sent him a text right now, I'd have a response by the time I'm done with this program. He's 58 years old. It's not age dependent. Some of the most forward thinking and technologically capable salespeople I know are in their 60s because they have chosen to dedicate themselves to it. So salespeople nowadays have to find out how does your customer want to communicate with you and be competent at it? I've got a client who only wants to talk to me on LinkedIn messages. I don't know why. It's convenient for him. And if that's what he wants, that's how I'll communicate with him. So- Hi, Troy. It looks like we have a few questions here. Hey, great. If you don't mind taking a few. Let her in. So Gerald Hubbard would like to know how has the trend of less face-to-face affected the relationship building between the customer and the salespeople? As you mentioned, sales calls have less fluff, which is usually a major portion of building a rapport with the customer. That's a good question. That's one I get asked all the time. And here's what I have found, Gerald. I think rapport building itself is different nowadays. Rapport building used to be what I called the donut call. You'd walk in, you'd bring donuts. You'd talk about their kids. You'd talk about football a little bit. And it's fish on the wall selling. The assumption is we're gonna be buddies. They're gonna buy everything from you. What is happening now is I think rapport itself is different and I'll give you my bridge to building rapport and something I've actually used for 30 years at Works Great. I'm not that natural rapport builder. I'm not the guy who walks in and sees a fish on the wall and wants to talk fishing with somebody. I don't know anything about fishing. I believe in authentic rapport. And one of the ways that rapport is built nowadays with new customers is simply letting them talk about their favorite things, which is themselves. My favorite question when I'm dealing with a new customer is I'll walk in and greet them and I'll say, I'm curious, how'd you come to be in this position? You know, how'd you come to be working in this job? How'd you come to own this dealership, whatever? People love to tell their stories and you build more quality rapport by sitting back, shutting up and listening to them than you can in a half hour of talking about football. I believe that those relationships can be just as solid or even more solid because by boiling the sales call down, you're focusing more on contributing value, really getting to know your customer on a deeper level. That's how I look at it. What else, Bill? Troy, we do have another question here from Barbara Coker. How does the metric change if the life cycle of the sales process is lengthy? Bid spec opportunities, three to six month decision-making process. Good question, Barbara. The sales metrics don't change. Your closing ratios don't change. These sales metrics work whether your sales cycle is a week or two years. Your management of the metrics and your expectation for how quickly you're moving people through the process will change. But if you're issuing four proposals a week, or I mean, excuse me, if you're having four, let's say four demos a week and you expect those to achieve two proposals, it doesn't matter whether those two proposals happen this week, next week, next month. Those ratios are still constant. You still got to back figure your ratios. Now, does it create more of a challenge for forecasting upcoming revenue? Sure, because what it really means is you need to build your performance model sooner. In other words, let's say you have a six month sales cycle and you're wanting to build a performance model for 2021. Well, right now it's August. You better have that performance model built or almost built, and you better be managing your salespeople to it starting on September 1 to get them rolling into that. Hey, thank you, Troy. And just one more question here from Roland Morales kind of touching on what you had just ended on on the slide in regards to communicating. Roland's looking for your suggestion on this in that would you suggest that all of our salespeople be on all social media platforms to better communicate with everyone? It seems like everyone has some sort of social media nowadays. Here is what I have found. For business, I think the two big ones are LinkedIn and Facebook. And by the way, I could be the wrong person to talk about this simply because I don't have a Twitter page. You may be listening to the only sales consultant in the continental United States who doesn't have a Twitter page and who doesn't tweet. And the reason is I had a Twitter page. I didn't tweet very often. And my social media consultant that I work with said, kill the page. It looks worse to have 68 tweets in eight years. Yes, that was my number than it does to not have the page at all. That said, I really haven't talked to any salespeople who are having direct customer communication by Twitter. The main platforms that I see are email, text, phone, and then from a social media perspective, LinkedIn and business Facebook. Some industries are on Instagram and seeing a lot of direct communication there. I haven't seen much of it in the equipment industry yet. Could it be? Sure. This is the thing about social media, it's evolving. What is big right now may not be huge going down the road. Snapchat, a couple of years ago, everybody said everybody's gotta be on Snapchat. Now you hardly ever hear of it. So that, by the way, goes to agility. You've got to be ready to move with the times. But here's the good thing. The skills that go into communicating on LinkedIn and Facebook are probably gonna be good at communicating with the others as well. Any more, Phil? Hey, thank you, Troy. Yeah, there is just one more question here and we can keep it rolling. It just kind of goes back into your comments on the good time Charlie. Steve Boyd would like your thoughts on how to adjust the good time Charlie into a performer. Your thoughts on indicators to tell if adjustment to the new way of selling is possible. Okay, the biggest thing you've gotta do is train them to do quality sales calls. And I would start with doing a quality discovery. In other words, I would train them to ask really good probing business-related questions and then I would go out with that person and see how they do live face-to-face. Are they implementing those lessons? And then when you get back to the office, ask them to download the information they got with those questions. There's a big difference between asking the questions and being able to listen and process that information. Basically, I would train them on doing business-based value-based sales calls, observe them and see if they're actually doing it. And just watch how they do it. I've got clients that have good time Charlies that have fully embraced the craft art and science of selling and they're killing it because that personal charisma, it goes with them going forward even into this model. And then I've got other clients, couple of the same clients who have good time Charlies who just refuse to update. Unfortunately, those people are becoming obsolete. Let's go ahead and move forward a little bit and I will pull for more questions a little bit later. The next two aspects of the salesperson of the future, relationships built on business needs. I actually think I've pretty well expounded on that. Salespeople who can discover business needs and serve those business needs and help their customers succeed. And then finally, high mental agility. The ability to go in, ask questions and then take the call where the customer wants it to go. Salespeople who go in with an idea that says, this is what I'm going to present, I'm just gonna do that and go forward are salespeople that are struggling. Salespeople have got to be able to move with the customer and go where the customer wants to go. Now to aid that salesperson, think about the tools. And you notice this slide is titled, use cheap and easy technology. There's a lot of cheap technology out there, there's a lot of free tech, there's a lot of easy tech to give us tools to use in sales and I strongly recommend that you use them. And those go into three basic categories. Number one is data acquisition. I believe in knowing who all the customers are in your territory and you can't get there just by driving by. I cannot tell you how many times I've talked to businesses and they said, look, I don't need databases. I know everybody in my territory and I'll get online and I'll pull up a database and I'll go over the database with them. Wait a minute, I didn't know about that. I didn't know about that. Databases are the best way to find every potential customer in your service area. Reference USA is a tool that you can use. It's free through about, they've got about 70% of the public libraries in the country. Check and see if they have yours. If they don't, they probably have a nearby one. You've got to get a library card and a pin that you can access this database and it is a full blown database. It's like Dun & Bradstreet. It's actually an offshoot of InfoUSA. It has incredibly complete and current data on prospects. That's a great way to build a prospecting process. Social media. There are some simple apps that can help and I'm going beyond just the Facebook app and the Instagram app, the LinkedIn app, that kind of thing. We'll talk about that in a moment. Finally, CRM. If you don't have a well used CRM, you're going to struggle with your customer information. So let's talk about data acquisition. I'm going to give you a very quick primer on Reference USA, but I want you to do more research and learn more about it afterwards. Like I said, it is absolutely free through about 70, 75% of the public libraries in the United States. All you need is a library card and a pin. Assign your salespeople, go to the library, get a card and a pin, and then you can log on. You have to get there through your library's website, but they've got all kinds of parameters. Business type, business size, all those kinds of things. The only limitation on Reference USA against a paid for database is that you can only download 100 records at a time. That's no big deal. Close your browser, open it up, get more if you need more. If you have ever used Sales Genie or InfoUSA, which are paid applications, it is the same data. The only thing they don't provide Reference USA is email addresses. It's okay, on an InfoUSA database, they only have about 10% accurate email addresses anyway. But it is, again, everybody can afford free, and this is a great way to guide your prospect. Social media. I was asked this question a little bit ago. The best way to build a social media program is find out where your customers are. How do you find out where your customers are? Ask them. Where are your customers? If you look at the main platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. By the way, YouTube is now the number two search engine on the internet, so it is a good thing to make YouTube videos. But what platforms are your customers viewing? Again, ask them, where do you go? When you look at social media, what do you look at? I'm gonna guess most of them use LinkedIn and Facebook. Figure out ways to connect with them. Now, there's a great app, because I was that person that I'd have great ideas for posts, and I'd wanna spread them out, and then I wouldn't do it, I'd forget about it. There is an app, and it's at the bottom of this page, called Hootsuite, hootsuite.com, free. Again, free technology. You can schedule out a week's worth of posts on Hootsuite, and I do it in about an hour, and you can sit down, just schedule it out. On Sunday nights, I'll spend an hour, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna post this here, I'm gonna post this here at this time. Schedule it out for a week, and then you just don't touch it during the week, it just does it. And if you're a little social media lazy, like I am, I fully admit to it, an app like that is a great way to maintain a social media presence. CRM. Here are the things that you have, and by the way, the equipment industry is one of the industries that struggles the most with CRM. And I think it's because our salespeople tend to be more seasoned, let's say. And the biggest objection to CRM in any industry is, I go out, I make my sales calls all day, and then I have to go back to the office, sit down at a computer, and type everything into the system, just so you can see it and be a big brother. Why do I wanna do that? Well, it's time consuming, it's cumbersome, it's not salespeople's favorite thing. The key to getting your salespeople to use CRM is the mobile app. Your CRM, a good CRM will have a good mobile app, have that mobile app on the salespeople's phones. And then instead of typing in a CRM app, when they come out, have them, because salespeople don't like thumb typing any more than they like actual typing. When they come out of a sales call, have them pull up their mobile app on their screen, there's my customer, I'm gonna log a call, it happened at this time, notes. Now I'm gonna hit the microphone button on my notes, and I'm just gonna narrate in what happened. Well, I called on Don at ABC Construction, he's interested in a new paving machine, the problems he's having with his current machine are A, B, C, D, talk to text, save it, I'm done. That way they can do it immediately in their truck after the call, takes about 60 seconds, and they can get on with their lives. If you do a lot of written notes, which I do, by the way, I still, when I'm doing a live sales call, or a live meeting, I still take copious notes on those old yellow legal pads. Well, I take a picture of it, and I save it to the customer's record, that way I've always got it. Your mobile app is the key to CRM utilization nowadays. By the way, a lot of CRMs will also have a good business card scanner app, so when you get somebody's business card, you can just take a picture of it with the mobile app, it'll load right into the database. That is my favorite method. When I go to and speak at a seminar, like I would have been doing in Orlando, probably I'd end up with a lot of business cards afterwards. I go back to my room, I sit down, I use a business card scanner app. You typically do have to do a little bit of editing, but it's a lot quicker than just typing everything in. Boom, it's saved in my CRM app. I love that functionality. Makes it simple, makes it easy to manage. If you have a CRM, make sure it has a good mobile app, train your salespeople on how to easily use the mobile app, you'll find the utilization going way up. What information should you be preserving? Keep in mind, your customer information is your most prized asset. Thieves could come in and take everything else that you have, and as long as you have your customer information, you can continue. So what should you be preserving? Well, the business card apps, plus some custom fields from your industry. What machines do they buy, who do they buy it from, where they get it serviced, that kind of thing. The business card main contact fields, plus whatever specifics you need to track them. Number two, the customer activity information, we just talked about that. Make sure that your salespeople are preserving the activity information. Then finally, the opportunity information. When you issue a quote, what is that quote for, what's the price on it, and what is the progress of that quote through the system? Save that information, and again, getting your salespeople to use CRM, it is a lot more critical to get your CRM to be used than it is to have the perfect CRM system. Believe me on that one. If your salespeople are not using your CRM system, it's junk, I don't care how good of a system it is. By the way, there is one other thing I wanna talk about, and I'm backing up here to the CRM slide, and I wanna talk about one particular app, and it's not one that I have a financial connection with, it's just one that I use. And I use it, it's simple, and again, it's free. If you only use the sales management CRM modules, it's free. Hubspot.com, H-U-B-S-P-O-T.com. It lives in the cloud, the mobile app is great, it's simple to work with, you can get going on it. If you do not have a CRM system, I so strongly encourage you to get on Hubspot. If you are looking for the perfect CRM system that you think you will be implementing down the road, you know, if you're 12, 18 months away, but you're gonna have the perfect system, get on. All right, everyone, as much as I would love to recap this CRM slide, I actually am not the subject matter expert for this, but I appreciate that all 185 of you have stayed with us as we try to get Troy reconnected here. As we do that, I feel like I'm running a late night TV talk show so I'd like to pull in our second one of two secret special speakers with us today. We have joining us on the line, Daniel Fisher, AED's Vice President of Government Affairs. How are you, Daniel? Welcome to the AED Virtual Leadership Conference. I'm good, thank you. I would have done my hair up if I'd have known I was going to get a call this morning to be in front of you. Well, you look great all the same. I do appreciate you joining us this morning. What should we be keeping in mind as an industry of what's happening at the federal level? Well, Phil, you kind of broke up there. I think I've been listening to politicians all day. I can understand kind of jibber-jabber and stuff like that. So I think I got the gist of what you were trying to say and you were asking what should AED members be aware of in D.C. And I think obviously you've seen the – we're in the middle of a presidential campaign, which everyone knows by now. We have the Democratic Convention this week finishing up tonight. We have the Republican Convention next week. And then Congress should be coming back to town and they have a lot on their plate here in the next couple weeks regarding – one is there's still a possibility of a COVID-19 relief package coming through. And also the government shuts down on September 30th without action. And the highway program expires on September 30th as well. So there's really a lot at stake. And AED has been pushing for, of course, infrastructure funding. Many of you on here hopefully have participated in our grassroots campaign. If you haven't, then you need to because I can tell you that we're really making a lot of noise, particularly with the U.S. Senate in terms of making sure that infrastructure becomes – is a part of whatever passes here toward the end of September. And something will have to pass, whether it's a COVID-19 relief package and or a government funding package. So there's a lot going on before we get to the election. And then, of course, there's a pivotal election. I don't need to tell anyone on this call about how much is at stake in November. So I see that our – Troy Harrison's back. So I will – Yes. Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate your time with us this morning. And as Daniel mentioned, you'll be all receiving an email from the Association sometime today with how you can make your voice heard on ensuring the Senate does their job in taking up a robust infrastructure and investment package. Troy, welcome back. Thanks. There's nothing better than doing a webinar on technology, and your own technology is dying. So that's so exciting. Sure. What do we have for questions? Yes. So, you know, actually there's a great question here from Trevin Krause, who had a question a little while ago about implementing a new CRM system. And Trevin would like to know, how do you get the buy-in to make this a successful sales workflow process tool and not just some futile investment? Well, I address part of it by talking about making it easy to use through a mobile app. The second piece of that is I would say that you absolutely have to make it a – find ways to use CRM so that it benefits your salespeople. Did you lose me again, Phil? No, we've still got you here. Oh, okay. You froze it. You were sitting really still for a second there. No, the second thing I would say is find ways to use that information to the benefit of the salespeople. There's a couple ways to do this. Number one, you can use the marketing information as a way to reach out and market to those people. However, the best way is to give access and visibility to everybody in your building who has customer contact. So, for instance, let's say I'm pulling up to ABC Construction. I have my phone. I pull up their record in CRM, and I see that unbeknownst to me, they just had a machine in for service a couple of days ago. Now, I get to walk in with my app together and say to them, hey, how did that go? How did everything work out? Use it as a company-wide communication tool, not just as a big brother for the salespeople, and I think you get a lot better buy-in. All right, well, let's get right back into it, Troy, and if you want to go ahead and throw that presentation up if you need it, or we can go ahead and continue. Let's see here. It's showing me that the host has disabled screen sharing, but quite frankly, we're on the last slide anyway. Oh, wait a minute, here we go. I got it. All right. You know, there's a quote here that I really like, and it's a Benjamin Disraeli quote, and it says, the legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example. I turned 51 last December. It means I'm almost 52, doesn't it? That's exciting. I don't have any kids, so I started thinking about what is my legacy? What does my legacy look like? And what I realized is that my legacy is the people that I've helped along the way, the people that I've worked with, the people I've spoken for. You know, anybody that I have impacted through my work is a big part of my legacy. You, everyone online, you're part of my legacy. Sorry to dump that burden on you. Anyway, I hope that this presentation this morning has helped, and what I'd like to do is extend that help one notch further. It's something I do any time I speak with AED because I love AED members, and I love helping and working with AED members, and that is this. I have a service. It's a complimentary service that I call a sales strategy review, and what it is, it's basically an hour-free consultation for you. We go over your goals, your strategy, your plan. You know, where are you going? How will you get there? We go over your staffing and your compensation. Do you have the right people? Are you incenting them the right way? We go over your processes and metrics, and, you know, will that support the goals that you have? And what I do is I give complimentary feedback on every one of those. I give free takeaways. Typically, I'll give at least two to three actionable recommendations that you can take to make money. I'll find two or three things, and I'll say, okay, you need to do this, you need to do this, and here's how. It's an opportunity for me to give you free consulting. Now, obviously, if there's an opportunity for us to work together, I'd love that. I will tell you, but the help is not contingent upon you working with me. This is just part of how I build my legacy. It's part of how I help AED. I love AED. I want to help them in any way possible. So if you'd like to take me up on that, and I hope a lot of you will, email me at Troy at TroyHarrison.com, or you can go to my website, TroyHarrison.com slash SSR. There's a full page on the sales strategy review there. You can even schedule your own at your own time, or just give me a call, 913-645-3603. Were there any more questions, Phil? I saw the little red arrow. We do. We do have a few more questions. Well, let's do it. All right, let's do it. So Greg Vassett would like to know, what do you think is the future of servicing a long-time customer who has been removed from any face-to-face with vendors, suppliers, except on an as-needed basis? These types of customers are, on the most part, always required at least a couple of visits a month, and in some cases in my market, are not too much on all of the video meetings or social media type communications. Okay. Here is how. One of the authors that I really like, both in terms of sales and in terms of speaking, is a guy named Alan Weiss. He likes to talk about dimensions of contact. And he says, you know, email and text is single dimensions. It's words on a screen. Telephone is two dimensions. We have voice-to-voice. We have interactivity. Face-to-face is three-dimensional. We have all the cues around us, you know, body language, the video, all that kind of stuff. I think that video calls live in a two-and-a-half-dimensional world. Any customer that I have, I would be working to upgrade those contacts and add as many dimensions as I can when I can. And I realize there are some markets right now where you can't physically go out and see people. Maybe they're not in terms of video. If all you can get with them is a phone call, have the phone call. I would probably not settle over the long haul for single-dimensional contact. In other words, I wouldn't just email. I wouldn't just text. I would be working to get phone appointments or video appointments or face-to-face appointments. I do believe, even in those areas that have gone completely remote selling right now, I think a certain portion of that activity, 50% to two-thirds is going to go back to face-to-face when people can because, let's face it, we're human beings. We crave contact. I do not see the entire world being video or phone only indefinitely into the future. This cannot, will not last forever. What else, Bill? Thank you, Troy. Just a couple more questions here. Barbara would like to know, is social media a marketing function, a sales rep function, or both within different roles? Both with different roles. I feel like marketing people are going to put out company-wide messaging. The sales people, I think their communication will be more individualized. I sold this motorcycle. Obviously, we're not motorcycle dealers here. I'm just jumping to one that hit the Facebook feed this morning. I sold this machine, or I did this with this person, or I had a customer give me a great success story here. There's two levels. So, yeah, I think it's both. I think both have different roles. Marketing is more company-wide. Sales people are more individual. Well, speaking of sales success stories, that's a good plug for one of the rooms that we're having later for our happy hour. We'll be discussing sales success stories slash horror stories. We're looking forward to seeing all of you there. Before we jump into the break here, Troy, I do have one last question from Ben Highhouse with Marshall Machinery. Ben wants to know, how important is it that your CRM speaks with your business system? There are a lot of opinions on that. I'm a sales guy. My opinion is that on a scale of 1 to 10 from a sales perspective, it's probably a 5. Depending on your company, maybe a 4. I would not, and this is a moment where I would say don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The perfect CRM system is one that speaks with your enterprise system, has a great mobile app, is easily implementable, yada, yada, yada, and that you've got it right now. But I would not let that be the enemy of the good. If you can't get a good one that speaks to your enterprise system right now, go ahead and roll with something else until you can get that perfect system going. Is that all the questions, Phil? That is all of the questions, Troy. All right. Well, hey, thanks to everyone. I've enjoyed being here. I've enjoyed speaking with you. Like I said, I love speaking with AED, and again, I hope some of you take me up on the sales strategy review. I really hope we get to talk individually. Thanks very much, everyone. Thank you, everyone, and thank you, Troy, and thanks again to this morning's sponsor, Equipment Watch. Really appreciate those words here this morning from Mr. Christensen. We'll now take a short break and reconvene at 1125 Central Time. If you're curious where the link to the next session is, you can look in the chat box. Looking forward to seeing you all. Thank you for your participation.

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video activity in sales

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importance of agility in sales

selling intangible services

competence in communication

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improving sales processes