Summary: David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. Today, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing reimagining the essentials. Welcome, Jay. Good to have you here.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: It's so good to be here once again. I'm very excited about today's topic.<br> <br> <br> <br> What's the Point of Reimagining the Essentials?<br> David: Yeah. I mean the whole idea of the essentials to some people it's like, "oh, essentials, that's boring."<br> <br> Right? But it seems to me that in current times we really need to look at the essentials and say, "okay, how can we tweak them or fine tune them or change them around so that they're going to be more effective in a 21st century post-COVID economy?"<br> <br> Jay: Yeah. When I think about essentials, I think about foundational type things. And once you take away the foundation, other things that you have in play don't work as well.<br> <br> So what type of essentials specifically are we talking about that we want to, that we might look at in one when everybody looks at it that way, but we're going to reimagine or rethink about them in a different way?<br> <br> David: Well, I guess when I think of the fundamentals or the essentials, I tend to think of the real basics, prospecting, presenting, following up when it comes to sales. And sometimes you start talking about those things and people's eyes glaze over like, "oh, I know all that stuff." And yeah, we all know we need to do it.<br> Knowing and Doing are Two Different Things<br> We all know we need to do prospecting. We need to make presentations. We need to follow up with prospects and clients. But knowing it, knowing what to do, is really not the issue at all. It's how are we doing it? How well are we doing it? How much better are we doing it than our competitors? How frequently are we doing it?<br> <br> How consistently are we doing it? There are all these different nuanced aspects of it that completely change the results. And when we look at things like prospecting now versus five years ago, 10 years ago, it's completely different. Same thing with presenting, same thing with following up. In the past, it was basically phone and in person.<br> <br> Well now phone and in person are a lot less popular than other methods of communication. So that's really what I'm talking about here.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, I think again, it's so important, you know, it's so easy to just fall into that trap of I've, you know, we've done it this way forever and it's always worked. I think it's hard for people to break free from those things, because it's hard to know what type of impact you really can have.<br> <br> And I think part of that is even understanding what your baseline is before you can make changes to understand if you're making any progress, right?<br> What Happens When Everything Changes?<br> David: Yeah, absolutely. And I hear both sides of that from people. I hear people who are like, " oh yeah, you know, I've been doing this forever. I know exactly what I'm doing and all that sort of thing."<br> <br> And then I have people on the other side who are like, "Hey, I'm doing all the things that I've done before. I'm doing it more aggressively. I'm doing much more of it. I'm doing it with more people and it's not working."<br> <br> And so for the people who are struggling with that... again, it's not really a matter of saying, "well, now instead of prospecting, we need to do something different."<br> <br> No, you're still going to need to do prospecting. The question is, "can we now do it in a way that is going to reach the people that you need to reach, communicate the things that we need to communicate and allow us to advance our communications and close the sales?"<br> Reimagining the Essentials Post-COVID<br> Jay: Yeah, I have to think that COVID has had a huge impact on reimagining the essentials. Before,
