Here We Go Again
In the last two weeks, the Dow has shed 15% and millions of investors have lost billions. If you have been paying attention none of this should come as a surprise. The signs have been there for those who were looking. Housing inventory up with prices down and continuing to drop, true unemployment in double digits and stubbornly refusing to drop, a dysfunctional federal government unable to keep deficits from skyrocketing out of control, commodity prices accelerating unabated, etc.
Yes, Dear Reader, we are back to 2008 with the only lull coming because the Feds spent a couple of trillion of your children and grandchildren’s money. Nothing has fundamentally changed since 2008. The banks are still insolvent and the Feds now own billions of bad mortgage debt they bought from the banks with fiat money (that they can’t unload).
Dear Reader, you are about to see more of the same – or worse – of what you saw in 2008. I hope you have used the last few years to your advantage by sharpening your skills to be able to compete in this brave NEW ECONOMY.
In his insightful book ‘NO BS Sales Success In The NEW ECONOMY’, Dan Kennedy writes, “only the most self-aware, self-disciplined, and highly skilled salespeople who view their selling as art and science, as a professional skill, and as a sophisticated process will prosper……………………………Placing yourself in the proper mindset space here is predictive of your future prosperity in or forced exit from your business. In The NEW ECONOMY, 95% of the money gravitates to the Ambitious and Eager-to-Learn, and will separate and be shared disproportionately by the most ambitious and most eager.”
Translation: the top 15% of salespeople will sell 95% of everything that is sold and the bottom 85% will pick up the remaining 5% crumbs. Sales forces will shrink dramatically. Since 2008 the drug maker Pfizer has eliminated one-third of its 7500 salespeople, a Clear Channel client of mine was told to eliminate one-half of her 40-person sales team in a period of one week. And just this week two of my private sales training clients fired salespeople for low performance, one of them the president’s thirty-three-year-old son.
The NEW ECONOMY will put pressure on companies to upgrade their sales teams and provide more sales training to the most productive sales professionals. No longer will mediocrity, laziness, sloth, and poor performance be tolerated.
Tighten your seat belt and make sure you have your shoulder harness securely attached because we are in for one hell of a wild ride. Frankly, I welcome it because it will thin the herd of imposters who should not be in the profession.