Virtual Selling

1And, Just Like That, Everything Changed

A global pandemic. Panic. Social distancing. Working from home. An economic crisis.

In a heartbeat, we went from happy hours to virtual happy hours. From conferences to virtual conferences. From the classroom to the virtual classroom. From selling to virtual selling.

To be sure, we've sought out and used virtual communication channels since the dawn of man. It began with smoke signals and then written letters. We've even used carrier pigeons.

Innovation in virtual communication accelerated in the nineteenth century with the telegraph—which was essentially very slow text messaging. The telegraph was soon disintermediated by the telephone.

In the 1980s, we fell in love with the fax machine, which was, likewise, disintermediated by email in the 1990s. In the ensuing decades, the online chat rooms of the 1990s morphed into texting, direct messaging, interacting on social media, and then interactive chat.

As early as 1880, an inventor named George Carey proposed a video phone. His idea was published in Scientific American. Forty-seven years later, in 1927, Herbert Hoover stepped into a video booth at Bell Labs and made a video call.

By the 1960s, AT&T had developed video technology to the point that it went to market with the Picturephone, but it was a flop. For the next 30 or so years, video calling failed to launch.¹ Then, in 2003, Skype kicked off the modern age of video calling.

In 2007, the iPhone changed everything. This was quickly ...