Kirsten Nelson Over the past three quarters of a century, we’ve lost our legs. As mechanical industry faded away in favor of “knowledge work”, stationary typing and talking became our day job. Sit in meetings, sit on the phone, sit in front of your computer. Then to relax after a long day, sit in a car and travel home to sit on the sofa.
Cue the counterbalancing trends of gym memberships, jogging, triathlons, and yoga. But despite our best efforts to eat salad and adjust for a more sedentary work life, even the triathletes among us find themselves losing momentum by mid afternoon.
What’s left to change? Start with the chairs. Get rid of them and stand all day.
It sounds crazy in a culture of orthopedic shoes and thrombosis socks, but standing is actually better for the human physique than sitting. Studies emphatically assert that we are actually putting ourselves at incredible risk of heart disease and other hidden life-threatening conditions while we slouch toward our paychecks.
If you follow SCN’s staff on Twitter, you know that we’ve been working at our standing desks since June 2012. That’s 18 months of extreme productivity- enhancing, creativity-boosting, calorie-burning life change. Thanks to our friends at Omnimount, we can attest to the success that comes when you #JustStand. With the assistance of a desktop monitor mount connected to a whizbang metal arm that allows us to raise and lower our entire computing setup with ease, we have fundamentally changed the way we work.
The addition of a piece of technology has reinvigorated our work and improved our lives. Can you say the same about the systems you sell to your clients? The question you need to ask throughout the sales process is, “How does AV fundamentally affect our customer’s business?”
Can you identify one fundamental way that your client is currently operating based on an old scheme that probably achieves results but could definitely be improved? And then can you create a technological shortcut to change?
We’ve all been sitting for so long, we forgot that it was a choice made long before we came to work. It’s not the best way, it was just the way things were done. It took a harebrained idea that goes against every existing office design to shake things up and fundamentally change our day-today business. Stand up, stretch your legs, and look around you for a sales approach that will carry you away from box sales and toward service provider bliss.
