Watching the new Honda electric car advert on the TV lately reminded me how change happens in our worlds. The engaging advert highlighted the ten automated features that the car had – automatic parallel parking, emergency stopping, advanced cruise control to name a few.
I remember my first car phone and six changer CD in the 90’s, cruise control and Bluetooth in the 00’s, now we have even more gadgets and automated intelligence in cars.
But they don’t drive themselves totally yet, that’s probably a few years away.
You see change creeps up on you, it never just arrives. The Honda ad reminded me. So how’s this useful in selling and sales managing.
- As a coach don’t look for massive improvements in your client, expect gradual.
- As a long sales process Account Manager, ensure you keep to the steps as the company is going to take it’s time changing supplier, and will never do it overnight.
- As this person’s manager, create KPIs that reward and measure this progress, not just the ultimate contract at the end of two years of hard endeavour.
- As a personal finance adviser, try not to package too many products (or change) into the shopping basket for your customer to buy all at once. It could be too big a step.
- Start planning your migration to your goals now. Set big goals but spread them over say, 5 or 10 years. Then plan to achieve them year on year, breaking it down into manageable chunks.
For us all the highlight of advice must come from Bill Gates “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”
Driverless cars are in our near future, as are automated intelligence models doing your current job and virtual reality of such quality that you don’t even know that you’re there, it’s so real.
Start planning for these now.
