Hello and welcome to today's webinar. Our speaker today is Troy Harrison from Troy Harrison International. Before I turn it over to Troy, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or rewatch on demand at your convenience. With that, I'll turn it over to Troy. Thank you, Karina. Yes, I'm Troy Harrison, the sales navigator. I'm out of Kansas City. Some of you have maybe seen me speak at Summit. Over the last six years, I've spoken at four different AED Summits, and I've also done some webinars. I'm excited to be doing this one today because it's about a topic that's very near and dear to my heart. What it's really about, it's called The Top Four Sales Trends That Could Double Your Bottom Line and Navigating the Future of Sales. What it's really about, it's about being relevant. I've been in business since 2004, and I have seen a lot of changes in sales. I've been in sales since 1990, so I even go back to what we might consider almost the pre-CRM era. I've seen a lot of changes and a lot of revolutions in sales, but I've never seen a moment where there are so many changes happening so fast as there are right now. As a salesperson, as a sales manager, as a business owner, it is essential that you be on top of those. That's why I'm bringing this webinar to you today. I want to help you get on top of those trends and be on the leading edge rather than the trailing edge because I think the trailing edge is going to get left behind. Without further ado, let's just go ahead and dive in and talk about the top four sales trends that could double your bottom line. We, the sales profession, are at an inflection point right now. Every now and then in business and life, there are these moments where big things are happening and they're all happening at once and you've got to start making some decisions. You've got to start making some turns and right now is one of those moments. As I talk about these four trends, I want you to understand something. They are not separate from each other. I'm presenting them as four trends, but they're all interrelated. They're like spokes on a wheel and honestly, the hub of that wheel is probably technology. I'll explain that in a moment. Sales has been through a number of technological revolutions. We've had CRM. We've had many different ways of communicating. We've gone to text. We've gone to chats. We've gone to social media. Now we're doing Zoom calls or Microsoft Teams or whatever your video calling technology is. AI, artificial intelligence, is probably the final technological revolution to hit sales. The reason is there's no place to go from AI. We'll talk about what that is momentarily. We're going to be taking a deep dive into everyone. Trend number two, younger buyers. I'm drawing my line on younger buyers. I'm doing it in a very arbitrary way, but I'm calling that trend line 40 years old and younger or 41 years old and older. They have different expectations. They have different demands. They have been marinated in technology and interconnectedness virtually since birth. Not quite since birth, but most of them have. That creates different expectations. That creates different demands. That creates different paradigms for how they want to buy and how we have to facilitate their buying. Number three, this is a big one. The average salesperson is more than halfway to retirement age. That's a brand new trend. The average salesperson, according to a survey done by Selling Power Magazine in 2023, is 47.1 years old. 15 years ago, that number was 42. We have a graying profession. We are aging as a profession. We have a need to get younger salespeople into this profession. By the way, I just want to say this up front. I am not being ageist. I've been accused of this and it's funny as hell because I'm 54 years old. I'm not being ageist at all. What I am saying to you is, George Jones had an old country song that said, who's going to fill their shoes? We have a lot of salespeople right now, maybe even working for your dealership that are approaching a very well-deserved retirement. We got to start thinking about who's going to fill their shoes and how to get them into this great profession of ours. Then finally, empowered buyers. Buyers now have more control over their own destinies than they ever have had before. A lot of that is technological. We've got all these different forces acting on our profession. Generational forces, cultural forces, and technological forces that have produced these four trends. It's going to be pretty essential that we get on board these four trends in order to keep up. Those four trends are going to change your business forever. I don't say that lightly. I cannot foresee doing programs going forward without incorporating some aspect of these four trends in them simply because they are such a huge sea change in our business. Let's go ahead and talk about the first one. We're going to talk about AI, artificial intelligence. The platform that everybody's talking about right now is ChatGPT. That's going to be the platform that I talk about right now. I want to start by asking a question here. In the chat box, please give me a yes if you have up to this point logged on to ChatGPT and done anything with it. Just type yes in the chat box if you've done anything with ChatGPT. I'm using ChatGPT, number one, because it's common, number two, because it's free. If it's free, that creates incentives to use it. I'm not seeing anything pop up in the chat box. This may be new to all of you. Let's talk about the rudimentary basics of ChatGPT, AI. ChatGPT is what's called generative artificial intelligence. What that means is it will produce a result, some form of content or written description, some form of written verbiage based on information that you put into it. People seem to think artificial intelligence is magic. It's funny. Whenever I talk about AI with people, the first thing they say is, well, I'm just scared that AI is going to take over and enslave the whole world and we'll be their slaves. That's silly. Here's why it's silly. I was having this conversation the other night with a few of my friends and we had the TV on and they were saying, well, okay, first of all, these guys watch way too much sci-fi, but they said, well, AI ultimately is going to outstrip us. It's going to take over the world. I said, no. They said, how do you know? I got up, walked over and unplugged the TV. Any questions? Everybody started laughing, but they also had to admit that I was right. Humans are still in control. Here is what AI is. It's what's called large language modeling. Here's what that means. I'm not going to get too tech geeky because I'm not a big tech geek, but here's what it means. You know how when you put a search into Google, you type in a search terms and sometimes the more words that you use, the less accurate your search gets. Here's why that happens. Conventional computer language understands characters and words, but it doesn't understand how to put them all together. It can't understand context. It can't understand paragraphs. It can't understand phrases. The breakthrough with AI is that they were able to give the computer ability to understand context and phrases. Actually, the more information you put into an AI application, the more accurate your result gets. I'm actually going to demo this for you in a little bit and show you exactly what I'm talking about. It's not magic. It's just a refinement of technology. It is a breakthrough. Don't get me wrong, but it's building on past technology that we've already had. With every technology, actually with every one of these four trends, there are myths and there are opportunities. First of all, consider me the myth buster. One thing I hear is that AI is only for big companies. This stuff is so expensive that only a big company can afford to do it. That's not true at all. In fact, I'll show you why here momentarily, but AI may even be the big leveler between the big companies and the small companies. I don't know what dealerships all of those online work for. Again, I know that this is going to be watched over and over in a recorded form, but here's what I want you to know. I want you to know that AI is something that can actually take people who work for smaller organizations or even individual salespeople and give them the same or similar level of resources for people who do work for big companies. That's huge. Most of my clients are in the small to medium-sized business space, so as a coach and as a consultant, and that's what I do. I mean, I'm a sales trainer. I'm a sales coach. I help companies hire salespeople. I do assessments and I speak at conferences, but when your client base is small to medium-sized companies, you are constantly looking for ways to give your client base the same advantages the big company has. This is one of them. Number two, AI can replace salespeople. No, it cannot, and I'll show you why momentarily. Finally, AI will give all the answers. I'm going to explain why that's not true. Everybody here, I hope, has heard of GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. What that means is that the worse data you give a computer, the worse response you're going to get. AI may be the ultimate example of that. Okay, let's talk about why AI is the most accessible technology solution for small business. Because AI is new, there are a lot of applications, and again, we're going to talk mostly about Chad GPT. It's free. I think, I hope, everyone on here can afford free, and I will full Manicopa. Until I learned a little bit about it, I was a little worried about it too, but because it is so accessible, you're going to find a lot of people using it. I'm even going to show you how to use it momentarily, and by the way, there is an upgrade to Chad GPT. It costs you a whole 20 bucks a month, so one decent lunch per month, and you can have the upgraded version of Chad GPT. I actually am going to upgrade my Chad GPT this afternoon. Here's the difference. The free version, the beta version of Chad GPT, was loaded with a huge data set. They basically did a huge dump. I don't want to say they dumped the whole internet into it, but they did a huge data dump into Chad GPT, so it had a lot of knowledge base to work from, so you could ask it questions. It could give you answers, but when they did that, it was November 2021, and they didn't dump any more data into it. So, for instance, if you ask Chad GPT to tell you about the 2021 World Series, and who won it, and what the games were, it could tell you that. If it said, if you ask the free version of Chad GPT to do the same thing with the 2022 World Series, it couldn't do it, because it doesn't know. However, the upgrade gets you a dynamic version of Chad GPT, which means it can access the internet, and is constantly taking in new knowledge. To me, that's worth 20 bucks a month. Finally, there are plugins for most popular CRMs that are free. I've downloaded the one for the one that I use. I haven't had an opportunity to use it yet. My fault. I'd hoped to do that before this webinar. I'm going to be doing that here within the next week, because I'm doing a webinar on my own on August 8th, strictly on Chad GPT and AI, but let's show you a little bit about Chad GPT. I'm going to do a demo here right now, and this is not a staged demo. What I mean by that is this. What I'm about to ask Chad GPT, I have never asked it before, and you're going to see how quickly it can generate content and responses, and you're going to see it live, and I'm just going to be frank with it. I am currently doing a webinar, and part of the focus is Chad GPT. This is live. Can you explain in one, let's give it 150 words or less, and by the way, I usually like to give it a word count for content, how Chad GPT can help salespeople to improve their communications with their customers, and you're going to have to excuse me. I'm not the greatest typist ever. All right. Look at how quickly Chad GPT can significantly enhance salespeople's communications with customers by providing valuable support throughout the sales process. As an AI-powered language model, Chad GPT can assist sales reps in crafting personalized and compelling messages to engage prospects and clients. It can generate persuasive email templates, answer frequently asked questions in real time, and offer product recommendations based on customer preferences. Additionally, Chad GPT can aid in conducting market research to identify pain points and tailor sales pitches accordingly. By using Chad GPT, salespeople can save time, maintain consistency in their messaging, and create a more personalized and responsive customer experience, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased sales conversions, and that's just a call and response with Chad GPT. That's not intended to be exhausting. However, I'm going to ask it one more question. Some of those on the webinar may be fearful that Chad GPT can replace them. Can you explain in 100 words or less what human salespeople can do that Chad GPT can't? I apologize. Boy, if you didn't know it was live, you do now, because I'd have edited that out. And again, I've never asked it these questions before. Human salespeople possess unique qualities that Chad GPT cannot replicate. They can build genuine relationships, empathize with customers' emotions, and understand complex needs beyond data-driven responses. Salespeople can adapt their communication style, read body language, and handle objections with creativity and emotional intelligence. Moreover, they can provide personalized, dynamic, and nuanced solutions that go beyond the capabilities of AI. By combining human expertise with Chad GPT support, salespeople can amplify their efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring that human touch and connection remain invaluable in the sales process. Now, let's say I wanted to make that part of an article. And how do I take content from here and put it into a usable form. Well, here's how. We're gonna copy it. Now, I'm gonna change my screen share yet again. I'm gonna put it into a Word document. Here's a mistake that some people often make when they're moving content. They'll just do a paste. They'll copy and paste. Here's what you get when you get that. See the gray box? Here's a quick tip. Here's how you get around that. Paste without formatting. There you go. Now, here's one more hint on this, and that is that what I have seen with ChatGPT is it generates about 80% content. What I mean by that is this. ChatGPT generates some truly good content. However, the content that it generates still needs to be massaged and manipulated by you. That's what I mean by 80% content. I've got a guy that I work with on AI, and I'm a sales guy who is very quickly learning how to utilize AI. He's an AI guy. He describes AI this way. It's the best intern you've ever had. It has a higher IQ than you. It has 20 PhDs, but it has no street smarts whatsoever. We give it the street smarts. But here's the opportunity, and remember GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. Here's the big opportunity with ChatGPT. Let's say you're trying to create an email for a client. You can just describe the situation, say generate a 100-word email that's gonna ask them for an appointment in a persuasive fashion, and it works. What salespeople need to do, what I'm recommending you do, learn how to use it, use it for what it's good at, and then you do the things that you're good at. But even if, again, I'm gonna use this example of an email. Even if it would take you 10 minutes to write a really persuasive email, you can do it on here in eight minutes, or in two minutes. That's eight minutes. You've got to do more customer face time. What ChatGPT does, in my opinion, is it can make you more persuasive. It can increase your time available to meet with your customers, and that's the most valuable time any salesperson can spend. Matter of fact, here's one way that I use it. I don't use it to write a lot of my articles. Every now and then I'll do a drop-in of a paragraph or two. I am great at writing articles, if I do say so myself. I'm great at writing speeches. I'm lousy at creating titles. ChatGPT's great at titles. So what I do is I will actually put the session description in it, and then say give me 10 options of titles, and it comes up with better titles than I can. Use ChatGPT for the things that it is good at, then you'd be good at the things that you're best at. Honestly, it is a time saver. It creates efficiencies, and it really can help your messaging and communications. And nowadays, sales is more and more about your messaging. From there, let's go to trend two, younger buyers. And you'll notice I say, don't say millennials. If there's anybody who's tired of hearing about millennials, it's millennials. And the millennial generation, they're not exactly babes in the woods either. They range from 28 to 43 nowadays, if you use the common definition of millennials. So, but younger buyers are different. And this is something I hear all the time at conventions, it's Troy, these younger buyers are different, man. I don't know how to deal with them. And these are the things that they say. They say, well, younger buyers only wanna text. Younger buyers won't see salespeople. Younger buyers, they don't build relationships. They don't have any loyalty. And I hear salespeople, and one of the reasons I'm drawing my arbitrary line at 40 years old is over 40s are the ones that I hear talking about these things. And I get it, there are different dynamics. What we've gotta understand is those younger buyers have been using these things forever. Maximizing use of these smartphones. They know how to text, they know how to IM, they use different communication platforms. And what we have to do as salespeople is figure out how to adapt to that. So let's talk about some of the opportunities with younger buyers, because there are. You can sell younger buyers and you can actually sell them better in some ways than older buyers. Let me explain. First of all, let's take the myth younger buyers don't wanna see salespeople. That's not true. Younger buyers will see salespeople all the time if you give them value for that time. And allow me to explain what value for time means. The conventional sales dynamic for many years has been to try and build rapport based on personal interests and then segue that into a business model. Younger buyers aren't gonna sit around and talk for 30 minutes about football with a salesperson. If a younger buyer sees you, they're going to see you because they think that you can do something to help them. What that means is, first of all, your prospecting messages have to be on point. You cannot call them and say, hey, I'd like to talk about your heavy equipment needs. Because unless they have a burning desire to talk about heavy equipment needs, you're not gonna get that appointment. You instead have to have messaging based around, here's how I can help you do your job better, make more money, get more recognition, advance in your career. It has to be quick, tight, and concise, right to the heart of it. And if you do that, if you message them that way, if you show them upfront, I'm going to make this time worthwhile. If you give me 30 minutes, I'm gonna give you 45 minutes of value out of that, those younger buyers will see you. The problem is that that is a messaging shift for a lot of salespeople. Remember, there's more senior salespeople that we've talked about. And so there's an adapting process that has to happen. By the way, I've been teaching this kind of prospecting message for years and years, and sometimes it takes and sometimes it doesn't. And when I say it takes, I don't mean takes with the customers, it always takes the customers. Sometimes it doesn't take with salespeople. You've got to rethink how you prospect and how you approach them. The second part of rethinking how you approach is how you communicate with them, the communication platform. Yes, younger buyers do emphasize text. They emphasize chat, they emphasize LinkedIn messaging, emphasize email over voice-to-voice communications. Get good at it. Figure out how to write a persuasive text so that people will want to see you. And figure out how to create short, punchy messages. You know, and I was talking to Chat GPT in terms of words, but you can also use it to talk in terms of character count because character count becomes very important in text. You may want to say, create a 160-word text that influences such and such a person to want to see me. Get good at that kind of communications. And the other piece of this, by the way, is here's a key question you should always be asking your prospects and your customers. How do you like to communicate? It's not like the old days where it was just default, you communicated on the phone. Now you've got to think about how people really actually prefer to communicate. You know, do they prefer to use voice? Do they prefer a text message? Do they prefer LinkedIn messaging? Look, I've got one client who's been working with me for 15 years. He's been the president of three different companies in that time. He's brought me into every company we've met. And if I were to call him right now, I could call him every hour on the hour for the rest of the day. I might, if I'm lucky, get a return call by Monday, or I might not. If I emailed him right now, I'd probably get a return message by next Monday. If I texted him right now, he'd respond before the webinar's over. By the way, he's 61 years old. This isn't an age thing. Figure out where your customers are at and get there because some of the more seasoned buyers have adopted habits of younger buyers because they've seen it makes younger buyers more efficient. Finally, let's talk about relationship building. Again, it used to be that you walked in, you'd look around their office, you'd go, oh, hey, your son runs track. I used to run track. Then you talk about track and that's how you build a relationship. Or you get them out on the golf course. You get them out for a beer, you get them out for lunch. And then you would segue that into a business conversation. Well, guess what, guys? The script has flipped. Now we have to build relationships based on business needs first. Then we can segue that into personal. When your customers see that you can help them do business better when you can provide them value, well, then what happens is then they'll segue that into a personal relationship. So it is a little backwards now, but it is something that we have to adapt to because again, you have to go where your customers are. I was at a conference in Austin in April of this year and there got to be the normal complaint session about younger buyers because most of the room is over 50. And somebody actually asked me, he said, Troy, how can we change these younger buyers and convince them that we're doing it the wrong way? When I stopped laughing, I said, look, you're not gonna. What's gonna be easier, changing your buyers or changing yourselves? You better figure out how to change yourselves and change your approach to doing business. And if you can do that, you're gonna have a lot of success. And hopefully they walked away with some ideas on how to do that. But you've got to go where your buyers are and your younger buyers are in different places. They're also on social media. If you're not active on social media, and I talked to an equipment dealer a couple of weeks ago who has four salespeople, none of them have an active updated profile on LinkedIn. In fact, three of the four show past jobs as being their current jobs. If that's you, you need to get up and you need to get on the program. Trend three, again, interrelated. We need younger salespeople. The sales profession is a graying profession. And I don't mean this in a negative way, so please don't take it as in a negative way, but the equipment sales profession is probably graying faster than most. If you don't believe me, walk around the AED Summit. You don't see a whole lot of young salespeople and young sales managers. And some of you, in fact, may even be struggling with how to hire young salespeople right now. And matter of fact, put in the chat, give me a yes if this is something that you have some concerns about, that you have salespeople that are reaching retirement age and you're trying to figure out how to refill your bucket. Give me a yes in the chat if that's you. And if not, that's okay. We're still gonna talk about it. But again, we have myths and we have opportunities. And all the myths have some basis in truth. And here's some of the myths. Younger salespeople aren't interested in sales as a career. Younger people have no loyalty. Young people don't wanna work on commission. Well, again, all of these have some level of truth to them. Let's talk about the opportunities involved. Number one, a HubSpot survey that came out last year said that only 3% of people trusted salespeople. It was a list of professions that people trust. Only 3% of people trusted salespeople. There is good news. We came in ahead of lawyers and politicians. We got that going for us, which is nice. But the reality is, and I think that number has dropped in recent years rather than increased. The reality is that sales has a bad image in the minds of people. And this is more pronounced with young people. We have to market sales as a profession and as a way to get ahead. One thing we see with a lot of younger people is they're nihilistic. They believe that there's not a way to get ahead anymore. They think the deck is stacked against them, that the previous generations have sucked all the wealth out of the marketplace, that they're not going to be able to achieve the American dream of buying a home and having 2.1 kids, having a family and all that because of financial reasons. And yeah, I can see where they're coming from in some ways. But sales can combat that. Here's why. Sales is a great way to get ahead. 5% of America's self-made millionaires are salespeople that have never owned their other business, and there's no other profession where you work for other people where you have that opportunity. Market sales is a great way to get ahead to achieve those things that younger people want to achieve. There's another piece to this too, and it is the demand for hybrid work environments. A Fortune magazine survey last year said that 70% of respondents aged 25 to 34 would consider quitting their job if they were not allowed hybrid work opportunities. Hybrid meaning work remotely and work from the office. Well, sales is perfectly suited to that. If young people don't want to be bound to an office all the time, sales is perfectly suited to that. And they work well with it. And there are other information surveys out there that suggest that young salespeople, or young people are actually more task-oriented, process-oriented, and metrics-oriented than ever before. So if you create a good set of sales metrics, they'll fulfill those even if they're not in the office all the time. And as I always like to say, nobody in the office is going to buy from you. So there are ways to market sales as a profession, and as a way to get ahead. We just need to do a better job of doing that market. And when you are marketing your positions, you can't just throw up a job description on the internet. You have got to market, if you're looking for entry-level salespeople, you have to market the sales profession, you have to market your company, and you have to market your position. That's not an easy thing to do. It's something I help my clients with all the time. Number two, young people don't have any loyalty. The reason that has come about is that young people do change jobs more often than older people do. But man, that's a trend line that's been going on forever. Look, the 40-year career, the gold watch, and the pension are pretty much a thing of the past. People, you know, most people, myself included, again, I'm 54. I knew that wasn't going to be a reality for me. And so young people are less loyal to companies because in all honesty, a lot of companies are less loyal to their employees. However, young people are very loyal to people. They're very loyal to their leaders. They're very loyal to their managers. If a manager is good at building helpful business relationships with their salespeople, they can gain a lot of loyalty from their salespeople. Their salespeople will be bound to them. And the next question after that is, well, Troy, that's great as long as that manager's there. What happens when that manager changes jobs? Well, what you need to do is make sure that all of your leaders are good at building those relationships with their people and that you have pipeline strength so there's no gap when that leader leaves. In other words, yeah, okay, John has left. He's moved on to greener pastures. We wish him well. And here comes Steve. And guess what? Steve is gonna be every bit as good of a leader as you have before. You do that, you're gonna be successful. And by the way, young people also like potential for advancement. So when you're looking at those potential leaders, look at those young people, groom them, find them a way for them to rise within your company. Groom the most likely candidate to be your next sales manager. You're gonna have a lot of success that way. And even if they don't build a relationship with XYZ Equipment Company, as long as they can continually build relationships with the leaders of XYZ Company, you're gonna reap the same benefits. Finally, straight commission. Young people don't wanna work on straight commission anymore. Hello, welcome to 1995. Straight commission is dead. Straight commission has been dead. I have 15 years in here, but honestly, it's been dead for longer than that. People, younger people, and I'm actually gonna put my generation, generation X is the forefront of this. I was this way. People want to believe that they're working for an organization that wants them to succeed, and that actively wants them to succeed enough to invest in them and invest in their success. And one of the ways that we measured this was, are they going to pay us a salary to help us live while we're learning the business, learning our customers, and moving on a path to success? We figured, well, if they're gonna invest in us by paying a salary, maybe they'll invest in training and onboarding and all those other things that are key pieces of success. And no, you're probably not gonna get younger salespeople to work on straight commission. You have a hell of a time anymore getting good older salespeople to work on straight commission. Here's how you should construct your comp packages. The salary should cover the necessities of life, and sometimes you have to raise a salary more to compete for the right applicants. But the salary should, at the very least, cover the necessities of life. I never want my salespeople to wonder if they're gonna get the rent paid next month or they're gonna have food on the table. The salary should do that. What happens is that creates a negative motivator, that level of insecurity, and that can actually lead to higher turnover. So create that salary that, at the very least, covers the necessity of life. And then your commission covers the lifestyle. Yeah, you're gonna eat on my salary, but if you wanna have steak instead of hamburger helper, go sell things. And then you should also have a bonus for overachievement. For me, overachievement begins at about 20% above quota, goes up from there. So salary plus commission plus bonus is an ideal compensation plan for today's world, not just for younger salespeople, but even for more senior salespeople. And actually, I think most equipment dealerships that I have encountered do a good job of paying a comp package that does incorporate all of those components into it. But if you don't, start thinking about it because, yeah, comp's a big part of recruiting the right younger salespeople. Trend four, customers rule all. That's a big one. And the reason it is such a big one is it is a change that has been driven technologically and culturally. And you'll notice that I say down there, your sales process is worthless, the buyer's journey is priceless. I wanna tell you right up front, this is a change in my thinking. And it is a change in my thinking that has happened over the last two years. I used to talk about sales processes all the time. I used to help companies build sales processes. I used to talk about how to maneuver customers through our sales processes. I've thrown that away. I'm not talking about sales processes. Wow, I'm a professional speaker, words are hard. I'm not talking about sales processes anymore. What I'm talking about is the buyer's journey and our ability to help the customer navigate the buyer's journey. You see, customers nowadays are so much more empowered than they used to be. Customers have so much knowledge right at their fingertips on you, on your products, on your services, even reviews on your company. They can even take a look into you and Google you and figure out what you are all about. They couldn't do that 15 years, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. But what has happened is knowledge is power. Information is power. And so here are some of the myths that we hear. And again, these myths do have some root in fact. Buyers do all of their research on the internet now. And then related to that, they only buy based on price because they do all their research on the internet. Buyers don't have any loyalty these days. Well, again, some of these are true, but the reason that they're true is the way that salespeople handle these buyers. A lot of this is a reaction to salespeople who have stuffed them into sales processes rather than allowing the buyer to navigate their own journey. And this is one of those things where if you perceive this as a negative, you've also got to understand that we the sales profession have done it to ourselves. So let's talk about that. Buyers do all of their research on the internet now. There's truth to that. Studies show that 57% of the buying process is completed before reaching out to a rep. There's two implications to that. Number one, if you're selling purely reactively, in other words, if you're selling based on incoming calls, incoming inquiries, incoming emails, then you're probably gonna join that buying process at 58% if those studies are accurate. However, if you're being proactive, building relationships ahead of time, digging your well before you're thirsty, so to speak, you have an opportunity to be part of that 57%. In other words, you have an opportunity to determine and guide where that research goes. So that's one implication. It means that we need to get much more proactive at building relationships before the buyer wants to reach out so you are that trusted resource. Second, get good at the 43%. What that means is get good at asking great questions that get to the heart of what your customer determines as success. Get great at presenting a plan with advantages instead of just features and benefits. Show customers, here's my plan for solving your problems, here's how it's gonna do it, and here's why it's advantageous over what you're doing right now. Get good at those things. Get good at handling price in a simple, straightforward, easy to understand format, and then get good at closing and asking for the business. If you do those things, you will be able to work with that buyer's momentum in that 57%. And if you don't, you're gonna be trying to push back all the time. And guess what? Today's empowered buyers hate being pushed back against and what they're gonna do is they're gonna go, I sold a buy-buy, I'm gonna move on to the next salesperson who will respect my intelligence, my knowledge, and the buying process. And that's a piece of that. You need to respect what they have done beforehand. As a matter of fact, a question that should be asked nowadays if a buyer's reaching out to you is, okay, tell me what you have done so far in your buying process. Let me know what information you have gathered. Sometimes salespeople are afraid of that, but we need to know what paradigms are working. Buyers only buy on priced. Well, yeah, if you don't give them any other reason, they'll buy on price. There's no question about that. We have to give them other reasons to buy. That means being a better question, but I wanna address something about this people only buy on price stuff. And a lot of times, by the way, this is one of those moments where these four trains intersect is that this is a complaint I hear a lot about. All younger buyers care about is the cheapest price. Ever hear of DoorDash? Ever hear of Grubhub? These are services that only exist to enhance a buying experience. A matter of fact, if you're one person ordering from DoorDash or Grubhub, you can pretty much double your ticket by having the food delivered to you instead of getting your car and going and getting it. But these buyers see value in that. It changes their buying experience. It changes their dining experience. So yeah, they're gonna go ahead and go for that. Focus on what reasons they wanna buy and how you can create a buying experience that is worth them paying more. And by the way, you should always assume from the moment you begin your question that you will not be the cheapest. Always, that's the best way to deal with price. If you're going in attempting to be the cheapest, when you are, you can be surprised, but most of the time you're gonna end up in a stupid price comparison. Always go in thinking that your job is to get your customer to pay more money for the benefits of buying your equipment, your attachments, and from you, from your company. Number three, buyers have no loyalty. Remember what I talked about about how younger people have loyalty to individuals? It crosses over to here too. The loyalty that buyers have is for salespeople who respect their process, respect their knowledge, respect their intelligence and work within it instead of trying to just stuff them and jam them into our sales process and say, no, no, no, this is what you have to do in order to buy our stuff. If you respect what they do, what they want, and if you respect what they've done so far and just navigate them through their buying journey, you're gonna get a lot of loyalty from customers because let's be honest, most salespeople don't do it. Be one of those salespeople who does, you can get a lot of loyalty for yourself and for your company. Ah, somehow this slide got offline, but you can see what it is. When I hear people complaining about these trends at conventions, this is what I think of. It's the old guy going, get off my lawn! Don't get me wrong, I love that Clint Eastwood movie, I love Gran Torino, we have to adapt to reality. And reality is that the sales world is changing and we have to change with it if we wanna succeed. Yeah, you can sit around and yell, get off my lawn, but you're gonna get left behind. I'm doing this webinar because I very badly don't want you to get left behind. I want to be of help. And questions, by the way, I'm gonna go ahead and pop this slide up and I hope nobody minds. I'm doing a webinar on August 8th at 11 a.m. Central Time. And you can scan the QR code at the end of this program or you can just email me, troy at troyharrison.com, but it is completely on artificial intelligence and I've got my AI guy on with it. It's gonna be a great webinar. So if anybody's interested in being a part of that one, that's not an AED webinar, that's Troy Harrison webinar, get ahold of me and I'll make sure to show you how to get registered. All right, questions. Do we have any questions from the group? Karina, do we have any questions? I'm not seeing any questions. Okay. Okay, well, if you have any questions, I tell you what, go ahead and put them in the chat box or in the Q&A. And if we get them up before I complete my final remarks, then I'll go ahead and address them. If not, you're welcome to email me a question. Again, troy at troyharrison.com. That's how you get ahold of me. It's very simple. But I do have a few final remarks here and I've got some takeaways for you. First of all, I hope this webinar has been helpful. I love working with AED. I love helping AED members build their businesses and I hope this helps you do that. This is what I like to call group help. I've created one presentation and I've delivered it to a group of people. I don't wanna say it's one size fits all, but it is the same presentation for everybody. I know everybody has individual needs. That's why I've created another program, also complimentary to AED members, attendees of this webinar, to help you with your individual needs. And I call it the Sales Strategy Review. It is approximately a one hour free consultation with me. Again, you can afford free. It's open to any business owner, key manager of a dealership. And here's what we do in the Sales Strategy Review. We go over your people and your processes when we align them with your goals. We go over your target customers, talk about, do you have enough? How do you get more? And now we go over your tech stack, what technology you're using to benefit your sales. And we can go over these four trends individually and say, how are you adapting to these? It is a one hour conversation. It is not a one hour sales call for me. My brand promise to you is you'll get at least two to three actionable takeaways that you can take and use to build your sales team and make money with. And I'd love to do these for every AED member, to be honest with you. Nowadays at Summit, I have people come up to me that never spent a dime with me, but did one of these and said, hey, this helped me a lot. Thank you so much. Now, if there's an opportunity for us to work together, sure, I'll tell you that. That's gonna probably be a separate conversation. If you'd like to schedule a sales strategy review, I'm gonna give you three ways to do it. Easiest way, put a yes on the chat box. Karina will give me your name and information. I'll reach out and we'll schedule. Again, please take advantage of this. Second easiest way, scan that QR code right there on the screen. That'll take you to a link to go ahead and schedule your sales strategy review. You can access my calendar and do that. Third easiest way, again, email me, Troy at TroyHarrison.com. Let's talk, but if I can help you, please let's talk about it. I wanna help as many people as possible. Now, final thing, I have some takeaways. I love giving homework. So I'm gonna give you some homework here. Here's your homework. Number one, go to ChatGPT, sign up, log in, and start working with it. Start understanding how to use it to generate your content. Emails, blog posts. You know, some of you have blogs on your website that haven't been updated for two years. That's dumb. It even makes you look worse. Go there and start using that to generate blog posts. Get some content going. It can generate LinkedIn posts. Have it generate LinkedIn posts. Get better at business-based relationship building and prospecting. Instead of that personal-based, get better at prospecting by understanding how to build relationships based on people's needs. I can train you on that, full disclosure. Number three, look at your sales management and recruiting processes to figure out how to recruit younger salespeople and bring in new blood. Get some people to fill their shoes. Make George Jones happy. And finally, embrace and understand the buyer's journey. Understand how your buyers want to buy, figure out how to embrace it, figure out how to understand it. Again, if I can be of any help to you in any way, please get ahold of me, Troy at TroyHarrison.com. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed this webinar. I hope you have too. Karina, that's all I've got. Thank you so much for being a great host. Awesome. Thank you guys for attending the webinar. Have a good day. Thank you.

Troy Harrison International

sales trends

AI impact on sales

younger buyers

aging sales profession

empowered buyers

relevance in sales

ChatGPT in sales

buyer's journey