How To Build A Sales Territory Like A Business In 2026 | SOS Ep. 386

We break down why outside sales feels harder in 2026 and why that pressure is a signal to level up, not a reason to panic. We share how to build a territory like a business, use AI without getting trapped by misinformation, and close with skill that still works when the market shifts. 

• the widening gap between reps who improve and reps who repeat old habits 
• building a sales territory like a small business with real principles 
• a real-world shock that wipes out 55% of revenue overnight 
• why “vibes” selling and blanket claims stop working 
• how buyers use AI to filter you before a meeting 
• using AI to create a business case and choose the right delivery channel 
• why buyers want to be led and taught something new 
• the P3 Sales Method as a timeless closing framework 
• follow-up, onboarding, and fulfillment as the start of the relationship 
• leveraging AI to support retention and reduce churn 

If you want to know more and you want to have a conversation about the specificity of your market and what you're trying to do, I offer a free consult, 30 minute 30-minute consult. You can reach out to me, Mike@SurvivingOutsideSales.com. You can reach out to me, DM me on LinkedIn. Or if you want to get started, you can go to go.p3salesmethod.com and you can grab the P3 sales method. 

Transcript

Welcome And The Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Surviving and Outside Sales podcast, hosted by Mike O'Kelly, presented by Sales Builder Academy. The goal is to survive in promise in all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating, or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now the show.

Build Your Territory Like A Business

When A Top Product Disappears

Buyers Use AI Before Meetings

Use AI To Earn Attention

P3 Method And Closing Skill

Follow-Up Onboarding And Fulfillment

Free Consult And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 0:36

And if you're in outside sales, you kind of are getting the feeling that that is happening. And that battle is between who is going to keep doing what they've been doing and who is going to elevate their sales skill and utilize what is available to them. You're going to have to seek out not just the information, but the delivery on how to develop your skills and build your business from the ground up. I've talked about it in the past, the way that I always viewed it, how I was taught, I didn't come up with this on my own. I was taught by mentors and coaches how to build a sales territory. If you're an outside sales, you have to build this as if it was a small business. You can't think of this as, well, my company is going to do everything for me, because I hate to tell you, especially now in 2026, that's not going to happen. It is getting less and less and less of support from your company. They are now relying on you, the individual, to bring a certain requisite set of skills to the table and the ability to do it yourself. This has never been more evident in sales than it is today, especially in direct sales. So if you have to, if you're on commission, you're commission only, if you're 1099, if you're in real estate, or if you're in med device, or you're in payroll, if you are reliant on big commission checks and you have to close deals, your company is expecting you to figure it out. They're expecting you to be a professional. And that means you have to elevate your skills. You can't just say, well, if I do this for another two years, I will develop naturally. I've seen a lot of sales professionals who say, I don't need it. I'm doing great. That could be the case, but there might be a seismic shift in your business that you have no control over. I'll give you an example. One of the companies that I was working for, our number one product was targeted by the FDA wrongly. Everybody knew it was a joke. The product was starting to take away from the narcotic industry. And the big narcotic companies did not like that. Our product was used for pain and osteoarthritis. And what it showed was it actually could get people off of narcotics and those pain pills. It was published as a trial. About a week later, our corporate office for the company that I was working at, all of a sudden, FDA regulators showed up one week later. If you don't think that's a coincidence, then you haven't been in this game long enough. Almost overnight, well, it was overnight, the number one product in my territory and the number one product in our entire company was gone. We were given a cease and desist from the FDA. Shut it down. And the reason why it was a joke, because it has one of the safest profiles, or one of the best safety profiles of any pain medication on the market. There's something crazy, less than like a hundred known, a hundred cases of side effects. It was something absolutely ridiculously low that it was such a joke. Doctors started freaking out. I started getting emails, texts, and phone calls. Hey, Mike, I'm seeing that, you know, it was on the front page, I think, of either the New York Times, the Washington Post. It was somewhere big. FDA shuts down this product. It was big. I can't remember what newspaper it was on, but it was it was big. Overnight, that was about 55% of my business. Overnight, shut down. So there's two things you can do. You can either complain and say it's not fair, or you can get to work. And I did the latter. I had to find ways to build my business up without that product. Some people at the company I work for couldn't do that. They didn't have the right mindset. They didn't have the requisite skills that they had developed. And they quickly found themselves out of a job. And I don't know where those people are today. They might even be out of the industry. You have to be prepared for anything. That means you have to build a very strong foundation to your business. You have to have very strong business principles in place. You have to have an operating system. You can't just wing it anymore. You can't just wake up, figure out where you're going that day, walk in, try to make some calls, working on vibes and trying to do deals, and you can't do that. You know, discounts and deals that wears people down. You're not actually building relationships. They're just viewing you as a way to get things, get money off. You have to have a system in place to run every aspect of your business. You can't get away with that anymore. So what's happening now is you have to be very good at the skills, and then you have to be great at building your systems. So you have to be an operator and you have to be an executor. And for a long time in sales, you could get away with being great at just one of those. You can't anymore. You have to do both. You have to be a great operator and you have to be a great executor. You have to be consistent and you have to understand that what you might implement today, six months from now, you might need to pivot. And six months later, you might need to pivot. And you might need to constantly pivot as the market shifts, as buying trends shifts. So this is what the trend is right now. Okay. All of your buyers are using AI before you even walk in the building. An example, buyers will say, What are the top five products that I can get to get me from A to B? Guess what, folks? If your product is not on that list, it's going to be really hard for you to get in the building. Gone are the days where you could just storm the gates and you could just walk in and you could use energy, you could use charisma to get by the gatekeeper. The first thing they're doing is they're going to Chat GPT. And that's really scary. So what's happening is now AI is controlling the narrative that's stopping you from even getting your meetings. And everybody is doing it. Everybody is doing it. First thing they do now, and instead, I mean, really ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is scary, by the way, because it's scary in the fact of how inaccurate ChatGPT is. And but people use it as if it's gospel. It's not. If there's any incorrect information online, it's going to ChatGPT is going to pick up on that. But that's what your buyers are doing. So what you have to do is you have to understand that before you walk in, you have to have all your ducks in a row. You can't walk up and then just say, hey, let me ask some questions and let me talk to the decision maker. That's not going to happen anymore. You have to control the narrative. So what does that mean? What does that look like? You're going to have to turn AI on its head. Okay. You're going to have to use AI to overcome the AI that they're using. And how do you do that? Well, there's a lot of different ways. And I'm still waiting for somebody to do this to me. So obviously, nobody is doing what I'm recommending right now. Use AI to make a business case to set up a presentation that you deliver to the person you're trying to, the intended target. And when I say deliver, I'm not saying in person, handing it to the person at the front desk, and they hope they give it to them because that's going to make it to the way to the trash. You've got to find out what delivery method that person uses. Do they use email? Do they use social media? Do they use text messaging? Phone call. You have to figure out what the way to get in front of them is. And I'm still, I'm a buyer. I still get hit up hundreds of times a week by people that are trying to sell me services. They're trying to sell me products. They have the latest and greatest. Oh, you need to do XYZ. Oh, Mike, I can, I can, I can triple your business. But all that's all they say. I can triple your business. Great. Do you even know my do you even know what my revenue is? What if my revenue is 10 million? You're going to get me to 30 million? Those those blanket statements just trying to grab attention, they don't work anymore. Too many people have been talking like that for too long. Buyers are sick of it. They're tired. Give me something that I don't know already. Buyers want to be led. They want to know that the person that they're talking to has the ability to teach them something, show them something, display something that they don't know yet. That's what's going to get the buyer's attention. And you're not going to do that by just listening blindly to what your company is going to say. And I hate to say this, okay? If you are a director of sales, if you are a VP of sales, if you're a regional manager and you're listening to this right now, if you're not embracing how to build territories, if you're not coaching your teams how to leverage AI to get in front of your buyers, you're a dinosaur. You're a dinosaur and you're going to be replaced very quickly. I had a director of sales that I talked to a couple weeks ago and then a VP of sales the week before that. And they flat out said, Mike, what do I need to do? What do I need to do to get in front of this AI thing? And I said, Well, you came to the right place. I said, I don't have all the answers, but I have most of them. Why? Because I use AI every single day. Every single day. I am building things with AI every single day. I see the future. And the future is building operating systems, building businesses within businesses. Every territory should be a business. So you need to be coaching your team on how to do that. Not make sales calls. Okay. That is a that is going to be a thing of the past. Making sales calls is not the primary goal anymore. It's getting in front of the right targets with the right messaging. And you're going to have to get ahead of what they're doing. Before, buyers used to be a lot very passive. Buyers used to kind of work work their day, but now with AI, everybody believes they're a superhuman. Everybody believes that they are they are, everybody believes that they are smartest people in the world. I remember I was I was talking to a marketing company, and um they were trying to get me to use them for their services, and they were telling me that, well, you know, we use Chat GPT, so we're we're we're on the cutting edge. Well, that might work for people who don't understand what the cutting edge is, but I'm using Perplexity, I'm using Gemini, I'm using Manus. Manus is my web hosting. I'm using Claude. I mean, I've I'm I'm interweaving a lot of different AI. So if you automatically tell me, oh, I'm using ChatGPT, there's no chance I'm using you. Flat out. In fact, I'm just gonna say it right now. Stop using ChatGPT, period. Stop. It is right now, it is hot garbage. Okay. And don't tell people you're using ChatGPT either. Don't tell them what you're using, but definitely do not tell them you're using Chat GPT. But I will tell you, a lot of buyers are using Chat GPT because the people that I talk to, the people that I interact with, other business owners in my market, in my area, they're like, oh yeah, well, I put into Chat GPT and it said this. So what's happening is there's a lot of, for lack of a better term, misinformation in the sales world. Your buyers are not getting the correct information. They're not getting the correct guidance. So what you have to do is you have to cut through that noise. And here's what's happening here's the thing, though. You can't just rely on cutting through the noise and then showing up and then going again with vibes. So before you could go with vibes, you could go with relation, you could go with charisma to get past the gatekeeper. You could do the exact same thing to grab their attention, say something witty, you know, cut through the noise, and it would get you a meeting. And then you could kind of do the same thing and kind of sometimes let's let's be honest, you could BS your way through a sales call. You cannot do that anymore. The buyers are more savvy with ways of looking up information, even if it's not correct. So, what happens is now you have to leverage what is out there. You have to leverage the tools, have a consistent process on reaching out and setting up meetings with your buyers. Then once you get there, you have to have a system that works consistently on how to grab their attention in the meetings. The good news is that is the P3 sales method. The P3 sales method is going to work until the till the end of time. And the reason why? Because it's it's timeless. It's things that my dad was selling, it was it was ways that my dad was selling back in the 70s, and it still works today because it taps into human psychology. So the AI gets you in the door, the AI gets you the meeting. Your skill has to close the deal. And that's where if your close rate is really low, that's where your bleeding deals. You don't have the skill to understand what your business owner, what the business owner or the person you're trying to sell, what they've been through, where they are today, and how to uh clearly and eloquently paint a picture of a better future state for them. If you can't do all of those three things, that is what you have to focus on. So it's never been harder to be an outside sales right now, but it's never been better because there's more tools and there's more resources, there's more people like myself here to help. There were no podcasts when I was in sales. There were books, there were audio tapes, and there were courses. There were courses you could buy compact discs back in the day. You could buy compact discs and you put them in your car and you listen to them. And then I signed up for a course, had this massive three-ring binder. It's probably like four inches tall, and had all these different workbooks. And I had to log on to this website that was super glitchy. I mean, this was about, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago. It was super glitchy, and it was just full stream, no editing, just people behind a microphone talking. And you had to go to the workbook and you had to fill it out. And things have moved so quickly. Obviously, with cell phones and smartphones, you literally can take things anywhere and everywhere. But you have to develop the skill. You still have to develop the skill. You have to develop the skill. And then what happens is on the tail end, that's when you can then leverage your operating system, which AI can help you with, to do the follow-up and the onboarding. Two things happen after a presentation. They either say yes, and then you go to the onboarding, of course, after signing a contract or getting their credit card or purchase order. They're gonna say yes, or they're gonna say no, they need to think about it. No, they need to talk to their business partner, et cetera. I mean, if you if if the discovery had had been done beforehand, you'd know who everybody's involved, but not everybody says yes. I don't like to get boxed in immediately. I like to think about things. I don't, I very rarely commit immediately. So the follow-up is where a lot of the wins can be made. So there's really two things. Either you're gonna say yes and you go to onboarding and how to get them into their into your product or service seamlessly, and you set up that system, you set up that expectation of what the next 90 to 120 days looks like, and make sure you follow up with the support. That's where your back-end operating system has to be tight. You don't want to churn your client, you don't want to not fulfill what you have because that won't lead to more referrals and more business in the future. And they're probably gonna leave you, they might leave you a nasty review. So it's not just selling them. That really, that really begins the business relationship. The business relationship doesn't start until they agree, they pay, they sign on the dotted line, and that's when the business relationship starts. And then you, it's on you, the seller, you have to fulfill. It's not enough just to get them to sign the contract. If they sign the contract and you don't fulfill and you don't set them up for success, you have failed, you failed them, and you've robbed them. And what's gonna happen is you're never gonna, that relationship is gonna be torn forever. So you can use AI to help you on the back end with that. That's one of the reasons why I've I'm building sales builder OS. It is a complete plug-and-play sales operating system from A to Z. Leveraging AI with some of the AI tools that I've I've created and I'm going to be creating. That's coming up in Q3 of this year. But right now, you have to work on your sales skill, and you also have to understand how to get in front of your buyer. If you want to know more and you want to have a conversation about the specificity of your market and what you're trying to do, I offer a free consult, 30 minute 30-minute consult. I'll give you guidance on where you should get started. And if it makes sense that you want my help to help build your sales system, we can also talk about that as well. You can reach out to me, Mike at SurvivingOutsideSales.com. You can reach out to me, DM me on LinkedIn. That's still the number one thing that people do is they reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I'd like to set up a meeting. How do we do this? I need help with X. Or if you want to get started, you can go to P3Sales, go dot P3Sales Method.com and you can grab the P3 sales method, all the courses that go along with that, and that you can get started on developing your skill and building your skills today. So reach out to me if you'd like to have a conversation or go to go to go.p three salesmethod.com. Check it out. Appreciate everybody who's been listening. Good luck out there, and uh, we'll see you next time. So we have an outside sales. Cheers.