3 Important Steps to Restructure Your Sales Approach
The deep and ravaging influence of COVID-19 on the marketplaces and our sales operations across the globe has changed the business landscape of the present times – Only Infotechanymore.
Now while several things can impact the performance of a sales team, most among us have never come upon the kind of confusion by the arrival of this Pandemic that we faced for the last few months.
Therefore today more than ever team leads and managers need to ask themselves how they can prepare their sales strategies for the future and use what they have learned during these last couple of months to excel in the days to come.
As we all know that while there be no one-size-fits-all sales approach for surviving this unprecedented transition, nevertheless here are a few important steps that all brands need to consider to succeed in this new world.
Step# 1
STABILIZING YOUR SALES STRATEGY
As this COVID-19 crisis and the global economic meltdown continues to unfold around the world, sales teams all across have gone into disaster recovery mode, trying to find a way to stabilize their sales processes and keep everything running smoothly.
Now the way you approach stabilization for your sales teams will depend on several things.
For example, you might need to add extra agents to your customer support team, so that you have someone on-hand to answer questions that your customers might have or adopt an intuitive and intelligent chat software and integrate it with your easy to use CRM system to lessen the workload of your existing employees.
You might also have to start training your teams to make use of video conferencing software and equipment to ensure that you can continue to demo your services from a distance.
We say this as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, as right now, the key to finding success and business growth is by making your employees as productive and efficient as possible in the unpredictable business world.
This will include accessing new business growth technology and tools that are capable of converting your offline salesforce into an online hub.
Now there are three important tools we should look into to aid you in doing this.
CRO Tools: CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization tools such as an all-in-one CRM, allows you to combine various components of your sales landscape into a single platform. This ensures that your team will not have to jump between different tools to get a complete view of the situation with any customer or project.
Inbox Management Tools: We all know that sales teams need more than a basic inbox to help them stay ahead of the curve, especially in this Pandemic-driven complicated environment. Therefore, your business needs tools that connect your inbox with your easy to use CRM, to provide you with lead information and other robust communication features needed for sales growth.
Hence having advanced communication tools for every channel you use to stay connected with your customers and teams is most necessary under these present circumstances, like instant messaging and more.
Remember the more your employees can communicate both internally and externally, the more they will be able to accomplish their sales objectives and their day-to-day works.
Lead Management Tools: Maintaining a clear sales pipeline is most essential in these troubled times. In fact, business leaders need to provide their teams with a clear playbook to act upon, so that they know how each step they need to take with any customer that can benefit them directly during these troubled times.
Therefore, a greater part of stabilizing your sales approach in this destressing environment is to ensure that your business has an ecosystem that allows for informed and fast decision making, like a technology stack that can provide easy access to critical information, while at the same instance collect data for essential future opportunities. So think about how your current processes are benefiting your employees and if they do not, adopt a new lead management tool to replace the previous one.
Step# 2
REOPENING YOUR WORKPLACE
Now once you have stabilized your sales teams and have dealt with the immediate concerns that you have encountered in your new business landscape, the next step is to think about reopening your hitherto closed business.
This is because the last couple of months living through this Pandemic have proved that none of us can afford to just sit back and wait for things to go back to normal pretty soon.
Hence if you wish to come out of this challenging environment with greater opportunities and a bigger reputation, you need to think carefully about how you are going to deliver the most value to your present customer base in your easy to use CRM and as-well-as serve the society as a whole.
Therefore, to do this, the first skill that you need is to focus on listening. Ask your teams working in all departments in your organization to pay attention to what is going on in your marketplace(s), which means taking notes diligently during one-on-one meetings with customers, collect data with your easy to use CRM tools and even conducting regular customer surveys.
This is because, the more insight you can receive during these critical times, can help your business to transform that knowledge more into valuable actions.
Begin with a holistic plan: The main objective right now is to take it slow, and always remember that the return to the workplace is going to be a slow one, and so your aim at this present moment should not be to get as many people back into the office as quickly as possible right away.
Rather work on a reopening strategy that is staged into parts while you look for improved and new ways to secure your community.
Now planning your reopening strategy with a holistic means over here implies thinking about everything from the government guidance you need to follow to the needs of your loyal customers and most importantly about the members of your sales teams.
Hence decide upon how many people you actually need to bring back to your office and also whether you can maintain the same level of productivity by having your employees continue to work from home.
Here are two questions that you might ask yourself right now:
• Could you better serve your consumers by sticking to a digital strategy that focuses on video conferencing and virtual demonstration of your offerings?
•Would avoiding face-to-face interactions for a little bit more longer make your customers feel safe right now?
In other words, as we said even before, go slow once you wade into these troubled waters and laser-focus on the health and happiness of your employees and customers above all.
Unify decision making and feedback: Now is the right time to show your customers, that your brand understands their needs.
Hence the choices that your business makes now for your sales teams need to be made informed by what you are hearing from your customers.
This is because once you can get a feel for what your consumers want, you can easily rebuild trust by creating personalized experiences for your customers that will make a real impact on your community.
Show and demonstrate empathy: Without any doubts ‘empathy’ is going to be the biggest trend of the COVID-19 return-to-work strategy.
This is because even though it is necessary to achieve sales objectives, businesses also need to share their genuine empathy with their customers and the community at large.
Hence listen to your customers and thereafter create a reopening plan that makes them feel safe and happy.
Remember in these critical times although most businesses assume that they have done extensive planning for their return-to-work policies, failing to put the right step forward for this critical process can seriously disturb your business and make it hard (if not impossible) to uphold crucial relationships with your customers.
Step# 3
CULTIVATE BUSINESS GROWTH
Now once you have reopened your offices, a have stabilized your operations, it is the time to finally focus on achieving your business goals once more by accessing new methods of growth.
This is where you will begin to see the foundation of your new-found normalcy settling into place.
Hopefully, over the last few months, you have had the first-hand insights into how transformative tools for business growth can be used for consistently education and growth of your workforce.
Therefore, cultivating growth now will imply carefully thinking about which steps will help your business to maintain the most agile and flexible means to deal with future issues.
Hence under these present circumstances, even after you reopen your business, continue using the productive tools and the additional training that got you through this crisis, as they will remain critical for going forward past these Pandemic times.
The future is customer-centric: Remember that your brand needs to maintain empathy and remain customer-focused as you head into the new landscape, hence make sure to empower your sales and support teams by providing them everything they need to know about your consumers in a single space.
Innovate and remain agile: If this recent COVID-19 business landscape has proved anything, it has verified that brands can no longer afford to remain stuck in their ways.
This is because, in this world of remote working, businesses have discovered that their old sales playbooks just will not work anymore, and so today businesses need something that is more flexible and agile to cope up with the ever-changing environment that we live in today.
Therefore, if you want growth make sure that your business is able to adjust to any situation and keep track of what is going around in this Pandemic-driven world.
Connect with your community: Try not to let all the work that you have done in your community up to now go to waste. Hence create a consistent roadmap that will enable you to keep delivering powerful support to the wider world around your brand and company.
Focus diligently to become a platform for change in your industry while prioritizing the wellness and health of the people around you, which should not only include your customers but even your employees and as-well-as your partnering firms and networks.
FINALLY – Only InfotechNORMAL
With COVID-19 hitting the world, the old concept of being normal has disappeared today, as we have been forced to rethink everything we thought we knew about selling and customer relationships.
Luckily, by remaining customer-centric and acceptance digital transformation and new strategies companies around the world can set themselves up for future success even today, hence we must thank advanced technology systems like CRM, CRO solutions and measurement tools that can help track our strategies that work best for our sales teams and customers.
We all know that facing a changing business environment can indeed be a daunting experience for any sales team across the globe, but businesses and brands that have taken this disruption as an opportunity to grow and evolve will be the ones to excel in the years to come.
Nevertheless, the question that still remains is: are you ready for embracing the sales world and this new normal of tomorrow for your business growth?