499: How to Sell During the COVID-19 Crisis

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to sell in the current climate. In the current environment, making sales right now is extremely difficult. A lot of sales people will be working from home and that in itself can be very tricky. Also, many businesses are going to be struggling financially and this will hinder your ability to sell your product or service.  In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what to do right now if you work in sales, how working from home can be tricky for sales people, tips to help you cope when working from home and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:12 Why this topic was chosen. 01:26 What to do right now if you work in sales. 01:59 The nature of sales. 02:38 How working from home can be tricky for sales people. 03:11 Tips to help you cope when working from home.  05:04 The importance of authenticity when working from home. 05:32 Why you should focus on what you can control. 05:58 Why speed matters a lot right now. 08:10 Why cashflow is king right now. 3 Key Points: This is going to be a tricky time for people in sales.Sales people working from home is highly unusual.Nobody is going to care about what you sell in a week or two from now. [0:00:02] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:05] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on The Startup Chat in our pandemic series... That's what it is. We're going to talk about sales because I have a sales something, savant genius, whatever word people want to use, but he knows a thing or two about sales. So let's talk about sales. I've seen some emails you folks have sent, I've seen some features you folks are releasing and I know you've changed it up, your roadmap a little bit, yourselves, in order to service folks. But I think the big question on people's minds from a sales standpoint, both if they're managing salespeople and they have sales people or they are a salesperson, what do I do? Everything's different now. I'm not in an office. I don't know if my prospects are going to listen to me anymore. Or even like... What do I do? So please lay it on us. [0:01:03] Steli Efti: Yeah. This is going to be a very tricky time for people in sales, but there's many other people that are in much worse situations. Okay, so a couple of things. I think first on an individual level, salespeople working from home is highly unusual and selling just from their home. And on top of it, it's going to be even much more unusual if the whole family's with them, right? Sales is such a context sport, kind of high velocity, high quality context sports, such a communication sport. And it's so fundamentally relying on the state that you're in being a powerful enough state to be able to influence people, hopefully in a positive way. That if you are at home and you are depressed or anxious or fearful or confused and there's children screaming in the background and you're in your pajamas and you're not trying to call somebody that is equally distracted at home, confused and you're trying to now make people pay attention to you and then make buying decisions, it's going to be tough, right? There's no sugarcoating and this is going to be a tough time. It's funny the first big surge of questions that I got from sales team, salespeople, sales leaders, was the selling from home piece. And on that, there's a lot of advice out there. And I think the only things I can say there is you'll have to find a way to get yourself in as good of a state as you can and you're going to have to improvise and incorporate, right? So if you do Zoom calls, for instance... I heard this multiple times people are like, "I'm doing these Zoom calls and then my children come into the room." Don't be like the one guy that was like whatever expert on BBC that had the wife or ...

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