Virtual Selling – It’s the Same, Yet Different – and Here to Stay

By Mike Esterday for the December 2020 edition of Top Sales Magazine
My last column for Top Sales World – in the July 2020 issue – was titled Successful Selling When Your World Turns Upside Down. That piece had a warning for salespeople and customer service teams everywhere: Your jobs have changed – your customers too – and it’s time to understand selling in a new world.
Call it the Pandemic Effect: As nearly every business struggles to find its footing, it’s truer now than ever: Everyone has a new job – and everyone has new customers. What’s more, many changes ushered in by COVID-19 are here to stay, even after we get a vaccine.
Most of us were accustomed to decades of calling on customers in person – setting up meetings, traveling to meet with them in person, following up that also involved in-person connection, and then dropping in from time to