The Nine Most Significant Changes to Sales Since 2005

Recently, I was thinking about how much "things" have changed in the last few years. It occurred to me that just the last half decade has brought a lot of it. The time since 2005 has had some surprising impacts on sales…

1. New ways to maintain, manage, and multiply relationships.

Today, we’re able to remain in close contact with people we would have lost touch with in the 1990s. Sometimes, that can be a bad thing.  In fact, according to one study, as many as 20% of British divorces cite online social networks as a cause. This connectedness has serious implications for your sales team.

2. Social networks (online and off) as a critical source of info.

Not only are we able to maintain, manage, and multiply our relationships, but we can also now use them to get (and share) more information. People put much more value on the information they get from their friends whom they perceive as unbiased (or at least with their best interests in mind). This is true of our “online” networks, too. Think about the number of people a recent college graduate can contact because of her Facebook account! The average person has 130 friends on Facebook. Social media means people don’t lose touch with each other the way they did in the past.