Episode 50! The Future of Sales

This is Episode Number 50! It has been less than 6 months since the creation of episode one or the Broken Salespeople Podcast, and we have discussed a ton of sales strategies for how to get sales TODAY. This episode Red talks about the past and what sales will turn into over the next couple of decades and what sales will look like for future generations. 

If you would like more information go to brokensalespeople.com. 

Transcript

Hey, broken salespeople. So this is the 50th episode. So what else can we do but talk about the future. That's what we're doing today on the broken salespeople podcast.
Hey, broken salespeople. Welcome to the workshop. My name is Red Stafstrom. And we are here to help you fix your broken sales skills. So I want to talk about the future, I want to talk about the future of sales where I see sales in general going over the next 10 2030 years, so you guys can be prepared as the world continues to change around us. Now, in order to do that, in order to predict the future, we need to discuss the past, we need to make sure that we understand the history of the way things are going and look at the world as it is now and start identifying the trends as they've moved forward. So this kind of came to light for me this week. This week, I was on a coaching call, I was speaking to somebody about the idea of getting a coach, and I was talking about what kind of coach would work really well for them. Now, this was a guy who, on the disc personality profile, make sure you go back to the previous episode if you want to learn more about disc personalities. He was a high D personalities. He was a dominant personality. In terms of birds, this is the eagle. These are people who are very, very focused, very task minded. Once you give them a list of things to do, they go for it. They kind of bulldoze ahead. The problem is they don't necessarily always look before they leap. They may be task focused and go go go. But they don't always see the big picture. They are laser focused on what they want to do. And that was who this guy was, he was that high D personality. But when I was explaining it to him and talking to him about it, I didn't really go into disc personalities. I talked about Ninja Turtles. See him and I were both about the same age. He was in his mid 30s the same way as I am. And the way I explained it to him was he was a Raphael. He was somebody who was ready to go ahead to bulldoze, he had the objective in mind. And he was going to run forward and take care of whatever needed to get done. But sometimes taking that step back, analyzing the the field is more intelligent. That's why somebody like Raph needs a Leo, in order to give the strategy to slow things down and then make sure that somebody like Raph is able to execute the right way. I explained that to him, and he was able to understand it. Because me and him had that same shared experience. We both grew up around the same time. Growing up and being born in the mid 80s is kind of a novelty in a lot of ways. I didn't really have the internet until the last couple of years of high school for me. It wasn't really big. And even then it was 56 k dial up was very, very slow for me, junior senior year of high school, it didn't really move. It took a long time for the internet to become what it is today for me.
So we need to start thinking about it that way. I as somebody born in the late 80s is I'm part of one of the last homogenized cultures in terms of generations. So by homogenized I mean similar. A lot of people around my age, we watched the same shows, we did the same things we played, we saw the same movies. Everything we did was pretty similar. Every guy in the mid 30s watched Transformers to watch Ninja Turtles. They watched Doug and Rugrats and Ren and Stimpy. They did all of those things, because that was our shared experience. That was what was on TV. There was only two or three channels for kids. So everybody watched that stuff. It as we started to grow up and we became teenagers. A lot of the shows were the same two, we would watch friends, we would watch Seinfeld. A little bit later on. We would watch the office, we would watch Parks and Rec we would watch all of these same shows. So we had that shared experience. But now start looking at people who were born in the year 2000 people who are turning 21 this year. What did they have? What shared experiences were they a part of see now If you have basic cable, you probably have 10 to 15 different kids channels that you could watch. My daughter right now has no limit in terms of what she wants to watch. She could watch Sesame Street from the last 50 years, she could watch just about anything. There's no talking the next morning about Did you see this episode of Power Rangers the way it was when I was in second and third grade. Now you have people who are able to choose their own experience, they are able to really pick whatever niche they want to really dive into. Prior to people of my age, people who are older than me, remember the world being even more homogenized. If you're a baby boomer, and you're listening to this, for instance, you remember three channels. You remember, everybody watched the Brady bonds. Everybody watched I Love Lucy. Everybody watched roots roots is probably the one television event that everybody who was an adult age in the 70s really remembers. Everybody watched jaws everybody watched Star Wars. Now for Gen Z. They don't have that. Sure, every so often there's a blockbuster movie like an Avengers, but for the most part, their day to day watching habits their day to day, what they read what they do, what their hobbies are, it's not riding bikes until the lights come on anymore. They are able to dive into the deepest niches of popular culture, they are able to choose their own experiences. So why am I saying all this? Why am I going into it? Because you need to understand that psychology as somebody who wants to get people to like, you know, you trust you, you need to understand what these future customers are looking for. You need to understand the way their head is. They have been brought up in a world of complete customization. They have been able to choose virtually every experience that they've been a part of. They can dive into these most niche, most subculture subreddit kind of topics, that me and you know nothing about that even most of the their age group knows nothing about. See, when I was growing up, if you wanted to be into board games, you needed five or six friends from your school who were also into board games, they aren't limited by that. You can now play video games on zoom calls, you can play video games on Twitch, you can talk and play GoldenEye with anybody in the world. Whereas when I played GoldenEye in my high school years, I was limited to whoever I could fit on the couch. If I had enough controllers. That's not the case anymore. I can now play Call of Duty with someone from Thailand. With no lag with no hesitation. It's a completely different worlds because they aren't limited to geography. They're not limited to what's on tonight. They can do and watch and customize and create the experience create the world they want to live in.
So as a salesperson, you need to know that, you know they've become accustomed to that, that they have that taste. They want what they want. And now it's your job to do everything you possibly can to provide it. Now, can you make everybody happy? Oh, and you shouldn't try to sticking to 90s references. You don't want to be net. Try to market to Ned Flanders. You want to market to your people you want to find your favorite character and speak to them. The reason I talked about met Ned Flanders as I remember an episode of The Simpsons, where he talked about loving plain yogurt. His favorite flavor of yogurt was plain not vanilla plain. Trying to appeal to everybody means you lack flavor means that you're going to because you don't want to offend somebody because you don't want to rule somebody out. You're going to bore everybody in the world. You need to pick the flavor you want to embody. You need to pick the people you want to work with. And no one cares if it's not a massive market. You could have diehard fans in a niche market and narrow it down. One of the companies that I really admire is a company called a warm word WRYWRYMW od, they are expert word workers, they know old school mortise, and tenant style word Wolcott wood, wood working. In terms of craftsmanship, it's some of the best manufacturer quality I've ever seen. They are experts in what they do, especially for products that are really mass produced. They are fine furniture makers, specific to people who like tabletop gaming, fine furniture, that's a niche. tabletop gaming. That's another niche. They are a niche of a niche. But they have they broke $3 million on Kickstarter, within 20 minutes. I want you guys to understand something, they created a product and sold $3 million created $3 million in revenue in less than an hour. And the reason they were able to do that is by offering a high end experience to a niche of a niche. They found their people they found their tribe. And that's the important thing for you to start realizing as a salesperson, you need to figure out who you appeal to. And it's not going to be everybody it never will be find your tribe build your tribe. And that's how you become successful in sales, because that's the only way it will sustain itself long term. I hope you guys have liked this please listen to the 50th episode of broken salespeople. If you haven't liked reviewed subscribed by now, take your time and do it. I'm giving you guys a ton of great information and it means the world to me to this channel. If you'd like to connect broken salespeople.com you could find me there broken peoples.com slash Connect. You could find me on all the platforms and until next time, go fix yourself.