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Technology is great, but it's only a vehicle, not the solution. I have been working remote, going on 18 years. Most of my business was conducted via conference calls and hardly ever did we turn on a camera, definitely not for internal meetings.
Now, all of a sudden we have the desire to see each other at all times and while it’s nice to have the technology available, it’s also a distraction.
When we do conference calls, our focus is solely on the content and what it is we want to communicate. We are not looking at book shelves, hairdos that are overdo for a haircut or cats that are frolicking in the background.
Zoom and all the other technologies are a wonderful invention and it’s really not their fault that we are over them, because (like most technology solutions), we started to abuse them. Social media is not bad either, it’s the way we use it that can be harmful.
And then there are the webinars, the ones that should be “educational” and/or create “aha” moments. In the last weeks I attended 4 webinars and every single one of them left me feeling with a “duh” moment, rather than an “aha” experience.
The content was broad, the presenters not inspiring and there was no clear takeaway. Everybody was talking about the “new normal” without really providing any insights on how to improve anything.
In business, it’s all about KPIs and now is the time to understand that seeing clients in-person and prospects is not the secret ingredient for success. Providing value and helping our clients solve business problems is the answer.
I actually heard a CEO say “now that we can’t see people in-person, we don’t really have a sales process”. What? That’s your company’s sales process? Seeing people? No wonder that some companies are struggling and others are thriving in this new environment.
Our inability to see people in-person should not inhibit our success rate, it should just change the way we engage with people.
Maybe we want to go back to conference calls for a while, so we need to think harder as to what we will communicate and why unless we have something really compelling to show. Visuals can be distracting and empty conversations and webinars that don’t provide a valuable takeaway, now seem even more shallow.