This is it.
Coronavirus is here for good. We now live in a Coronavirus world. Visited Deloitte today and to have a face to face meeting, I had to sign a declaration that I haven't been to certain countries.
There has been an announcement that there has been a person with the virus in the London facebook office.
Already meetings are being postponed and moving online. The conference call companies I'm sure are going to have field day.
The travel industry will be hit hard. The disruption they were going to feel because of the move to sustainability, has been accelerated. Flybe the airplane company went down this week, who will be next?
What other industries will be hit, I have no idea what industry you work in but, here's a serious question
What are you going to do?
The engine room of any business is sales and marketing.
What if all of the conferences and events that you were going to attend to generate business are cancelled?
Normally you would take leads from these conferences and the sales people would have face-to-face meetings. This isn't going to happen.
Not only could your industry and company be under pressure from these external factors, but how are you going to make your number? Any number?
How do you build authentic relationships if you cannot have face-to-face meetings?
Have you thought about social media?
We offer a social selling methodology, that allows your salespeople to have a "shop window" so they look good online. We show them how to connect so they can build relationships without being spammy and we show them how to create content so they look interesting.
This enables them to prospect, to nurture, to accelerate pipeline and to close business through social.
This does not invalidate anything they have learned before about selling or we are doing are lifting their analogue territory and making it digital.
This enables you to scale your territory as conversations happen in parallel on social and series in analogue, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I reckon we are at a tipping point where this is the norm.
So if you don't do something now, you are going to have to play pretty hard to catch up.
And handshakes haven’t been the standard default for as long as we think–they were codified by the Quakers five hundred years ago, because they were thought to be more egalitarian than tipping a hat or bowing.