Newsletter #1

Three Trends Changing the Business World

Does it ever feel as if the modern world is pushing you to buy a house, get educated, while still working, trying to come up with your own investment plan, stay active, and ‘connect’ with people without ever speaking to them? If you’ve ever felt that, I don’t think you’re alone. Personally, I’m not convinced that this is progress.

Welcome to Scott’s Thoughts.

In this time of rapid transformation, both for myself and in the world around us, I need a place to get my thoughts out onto paper (per-se). I find that writing is one of the best ways to process complicated ideas.

My hope is that after 25 years of working in the housing market, financial industry, sales, and sales coaching… the frame through which I’m seeing these changes can be helpful for you.

There’s a confluence of events, or, in other words, ‘three megatrends’ I see that are changing not only the world of sales, but how sales teams operate, and the overall structure of sales organizations! At a deeper level, these trends are affecting almost every facet of our society and our daily lives.

What I aim to do in this inaugural newsletter is address each of these trends one by one, beginning with the first one.

#1 - Moving to a ‘Contactless Society’

There is a shift towards systematically removing human connection, often at a business & societal cost that I don’t think we fully understand.

The business world, social media, and society at large, is doing everything it can to move us away from real, human interaction, and it scares me.

I think it should scare you too.

Think about it, some of the most influential businesses of our time are trying to move us towards a ‘contactless society.’ Many of the ‘Unicorn’ companies of the last two decades that have gotten a lot of press: Peloton, Instacart, Reddit, Door Dash, Mint (bought by and rebranded to Rocket Money), Netflix, Coursera, Substack, and Slack - are built on the idea of disconnecting us from the perceived annoyances of interacting with these pesky little humans.

All of these businesses have the goal of REMOVING humans from interacting with each other at the gym, at the store, in the movie theater, at work, and in educational institutions.

Even reading a newspaper at the bus stop… which could spark a conversation with a stranger -OR- having a political conversation around the bar is going away.

It has been replaced by ordering an Uber (piloted by a mostly faceless driver, and more recently, driverless cars), where we listen to a podcast catered to our existing beliefs, while we comment anonymously on a Reddit post, discussing a topic with people that we’ll never meet in person!

In some ways we are living through a paradigm shift where humans are being trained to NOT interact with other humans!!!

Post Covid, multiple studies point in the same direction: fewer close friendships, fewer in-person interactions, more isolation, and a push to “do business” with no human interaction… and it’s ONLY getting WORSE!

The amount of teenagers who say that they ‘meet-up’ or connect with friends outside of school at least once a day, has dropped from well above 50% in the 1980s and 1990s, to just under 25% as of 2020.

Current estimates show this number is closer to 10%. The current crop of teenagers believe that social media interaction is a fulfilling, and in some ways, a necessary replacement for real human engagement!

Another study shows that from 1990 to 2021, men and women reported a 60%-70% drop in the number of people that they considered close friends.

The number of men who reported having NO friends at all increased by 500%. The number of women who recently said that they had no close friends increased by 1,000%

The most alarming stat I found is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), showing that humans, post Covid, have had more than a 50% drop-off in face-to-face, or in-person contact with other human beings. In less than a decade, humans have eliminated 50% or more of the very interactions that make us human.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

And if you're wondering what this has got to do with you, your career and your life, we're going to get to that in just a moment. But first, this brings me to trend number two.

#2 - The Eradication of Mediators, Educators, & Advisors

Especially in the housing & financial services industry, the push is to get rid of the knowledge workers - to rid consumers of having to ‘waste time’ with a human.

From class action lawsuits against the National Association of Realtors, to FinTech companies trying to remove financial planners in favor of robo-advisors, to mortgage companies claiming to be able to get you a home-loan with the ‘click-of-a-button’ - humans are being pushed out of pivotal roles in the pursuit of profit & the perception of convenience.

For the financial professional or the sales-person who has spent a lifetime gathering knowledge to help their clients, this is a demoralizing turn of events.

Even at the company level of these firms, things are changing drastically. In our post-Covid world, businesses are rapidly moving towards a decentralized, officeless business model that often leaves salesteams lonely and rudderless.

Until 2020 I, like many other professionals, thrived by working in an in-person environment. Like the prolific podcaster & author Scott Galloway has said on his podcast many times before, “Ideas need to have sex to spawn new ideas. That only happens in person!”

When I was working in-person, did team members waste some time around the water-cooler talking about the bad referee call during last night’s game, or last weekend’s episode of Game of Thrones… of course they did.

However, did the in-person nature of office culture, prior to 2020, help spawn amazing marketing & sales ideas? Did it create friendly rivalries amongst sales people that helped drive production? Did it allow for problems to be solved quickly, and in-person, without the confusion of 27 emails being sent back and forth? Did it create better relationships & retention rates when the team could grab a beer together after work?

ABSOLUTELY it DID!

Which brings us to the third trend that represents the focus of our issue here today, which is…

#3 - AI is Reshaping the Way Business is Done

AI is changing business operations and the way that consumers interact with business professionals at a break-neck pace. Recently, my partner Leah, who has taken over my pipeline of mortgages as a Loan Officer, received the following email from a prospective home-buyer (which I paraphrased - it was much longer and more detailed in its original form):

Hello,

My name is XXXXX. I am planning to purchase a condo in the area, and I’m currently selecting a mortgage broker to work with.

I prefer to communicate by email at this stage, please do not ask me for a phone call. I’m hoping you can provide written responses to the questions below.

High-level view of my situation:

- First-time buyers

- Target price: ~$300,000, with flexibility up to ~$350,000 if needed

- Property type: Condo

- Owner-occupied primary residence

- Household income: approximately $xxx,000-$xxx,000 annually

- Credit scores: above XXX

Questions:

1. How much experience do you have closing condo loans, specifically with HOA approvals?

2. What loan programs would you typically recommend for someone with our profile?

3. Do you charge a broker fee?

4. How do you handle HOA reviews?

5. If a condo HOA fails approval with one lender, are you able to pivot to another lender?

6. What is your typical timeline to close a condo loan once under contract?

7. Who would be my primary point of contact during the loan process?

8. How do you typically communicate with clients (email, portal, phone), and what is your average response time?

If it’s helpful, I can also provide an income and credit snapshot by email.

Thank you for your time. I’m speaking with several mortgage brokers to understand my options and see who I work best with. I appreciate detailed written responses, as they help me make an informed decision.

Best,

XXXXXX

For context, in my 25-year career as a loan officer I closed over 3,000 loans, and took over 10,000 mortgage applications… and no potential home-owner has EVER sent an email like this. This was clearly written by AI.

What struck me the most about this email was the 2nd to last line: “I’m speaking with several mortgage brokers to understand my options and see who I work best with” - this legitimately made me laugh out loud.

This client is NOT “speaking” with several mortgage brokers to see who she “works best with!” She’s using an email, written by AI, to gather more information than she could possibly process as a first-time buyer. Should I put this email back into AI and come up with a response? So she can put my response into AI and respond to me?

This is NOT the world sales-professionals should want to live in. It doesn’t help anyone!

This email request falls into the modern phenomenon of thinking that data is the same thing as knowledge or wisdom. Buying a home is the largest investment & financial decision that most Americans will make in their lifetime.

Not being willing to have a conversation with a seasoned professional about that process is doing this home-buyer, and the mortgage professional, a disservice!

I think as sales professionals, and even humans, we have a choice to drift into isolation, accept that the future is ‘contactless,’ and be completely disconnected…

Or, we can deliberately rebuild human-centric connection, build 'Micro-Communities’ (which we will dive into in our next newsletter), and improve processes that optimize for human connection.

In my next newsletter… I’ll dig into a framework that I think might help those of you who feel like I do, so you can create the type of local, in-person communities that I love being part of. Frankly, I think a shift is needed, and it represents a massive competitive advantage for those who lean into a contrarian paradigm.

I’m hoping my words above will resonate – one of my goals this year is to connect with a select number of sales people, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs to help not only articulate the frustration that many of us may be feeling right now, but even more importantly, explore the solutions to these problems. I have found that these solutions are not always obvious on the surface, and I’m looking forward to brainstorming with you…

In fact, many of the solutions are unconventional, some are perhaps unpopular, and most importantly they require a contrarian way of looking at the world. Fixing the problems I addressed above is going to be the topic of our next issue in this series, which will be coming right around the corner. Stay tuned…

BTW… none of this was written by AI, my assistant, or a ghost writer. Just me. A real person who probably made a few typos in the email above.

My Invitation to you is this: If you’re feeling any of these forces I’ve described above at work, HIT REPLY to this email, and give me your thoughts. I personally read each and every response. Hearing from you would not only mean the world to me, but it would also help me shape the upcoming issues of this newsletter. And as a bonus, I will be doing my best to individually respond to each email I receive to this brand new “Scott’s Thoughts” newsletter!

Till the next time I have 2 hours to think,

Scott :-)

P.S. - some of the graphics and charts were created by AI because design simply isn’t my zone of genius. I’m not anti-AI, I’m anti fake thoughts written by a large language model. I didn't spend the 70,000 hours required to create the image below by hand, so you’ll just have to deal with it :-)