Sales have recently changed drastically, how would poor salespeople survive, then? Should they change their careers?

Adaptability is the key to survival, especially when it comes to sales. Denying that there has been no fall in sales globally due to the pandemic situation would be wrong. But it’s also a fact that sales will never come to an end. Certainly, there will be ups and downs for the demand for any product.

Depending upon one’s financial condition, a salesperson could stick with it for a while, introspect and perform a refresh for his sales strategy. I know many people in sales who switched to online lead generation and sales contact methods and are doing great. On the contrary, then the ones with low sales count regardless of method will have to change careers. If not sales, then what? Well, let’s not complicate this answer by discussing the alternatives right now.

Coming straight to the point, before any salespeople decide to change their career, I would suggest considering reading this answer. It’s not that traditional sales opportunities have changed drastically for the first time. Being into the sales and marketing of primarily digital products for more than ten years, I have experienced dips due to certain events impacting the health of the niche in which I was selling the product. There are multiple reasons to blame for that, and not all of them are outside of our control. Today, I would be discussing the reasons in the context of customers and how to approach them.

Since my job involves social contact with industry experts, and I do sales research often for personal improvement, I have discovered that in situations like our current one today, salespeople need to up their game if they want to last in the field. After discussing individually with the salespeople from different fields about their sales figures, I have covered five universal objections that customers have when you are making sales to them. A lot of salespeople I talked to who did not understand these points or implement them in their conversations with customers would later be in a different line of work when I met up with them, months or years later. In other words, they didn’t last when a change in the market made selling more difficult.

In my post: 5 Deep-Seated Customer Doubts That Kill Your Sales (And How to Erase Them), I have suggested detailed solutions to those exact objections. If anyone works upon those, he/she could get better sales numbers and a reason to stay in the field of sales for longer.

We’re in an uncertain time right now, so overcoming customer objections is more crucial than ever. I say at least try it in tandem with a pivot into more socially distant selling methods, such as social media and cold calling. Online selling, in general, has been doing great during these times, and if the situation is so bad a salesperson wants to change their career, what do they have to lose from trying these solutions?

Sales is a numbers game, and you can make the numbers work in your favor by going after the right kind of people for your offer, being a friendly and effective salesperson, and other factors that boil down to working smarter, not harder. But I won’t be going into that right now. Just know that I am biased, and I prefer to ask “How can I do this better?” before asking “Should I switch to something else?”

For your question, I would say that staying or not in a particular field of work is a personal decision influenced by market conditions, but also yourself. It’s always worth it to keep looking for better opportunities and follow a career path that seems promising. Though market conditions do not always remain the same, the risk would still be there if you pursue any other option as well.

Good Luck! Stay Positive!

Thanks,

Cleo