No, I will not talk about the endless possibilities of remote working and WFH. We all had to do that and for some it worked better than for others – it really depends on your individual situation at home.
I want to show you 3 real things our clients faced and finally managed in this difficult COVID situation.
1. Have outbound lead generation in your sales process
COVID has fundamentally collapsed the way most of us network and meet with new potential buyers – increasingly, many are concluding that this disruption will have longer term effects on business development and how we connect with new potential buyers.
Due to cancelled networking events such as fairs, conferences, etc. outbound lead generation is the only scalable and predictable sales method to grow and export a high ticket business to new market segments and geographies.
Outbound lead generation is not about automated email sending, it’s about building one-to-one relationshops. Two articles I strongly recommend to read if you are looking at outbound lead generation
We Are In An Outbound Sales Renaissance
11 Tips To Improve Your Email Prospecting
2. ROI > 3 months? Go and adjust your value proposition
Pre-COVID sales messages where like “one solution for all…”, “replaces your outdated…” and “increases the quality of…”. They all indicated a long return-on-invest (ROI) with a significant upfront investment.
Meanwhile, companies are looking at very short ROI horizons – max. 3 months. If your core product/solution has a ROI of 12 or more months, you should definitely find those parts of your solution that provides immediate returns and benefits and splinter them off from your core product.
This is called product splintering. Here’s a detailed description Product Splintering – Lead Magnets And Entry Point Offers
3. Pivot your B2B business away from face-to-face field sales
Qualification/discovery meetings have been transitioning from face-to-face to online meetings for some time but COVID has accelerated this 10x.
On one hand, online meetings have a big advantage when it comes to meeting efficiency and cost. On the other hand, those super efficient (short!) sales calls leave a narrow window for sellers to build relationships and collect important insights needed to push the process to the next stages.
Suddenly things like these become an issue, again:
– How to run value-driven, short demos?
– How to earn the right to ask questions quickly?
– How to get the prospect talking about their problem immediately?
– How to use exact wording of key areas: eg. price, weaknesses of the product, objection handling…
– How to guide the customer, maintain their attention, and setup a followup.
– How to strip away awkward or unnecessary parts of call to save precious minutes and maintain customer interest.
With Zoom-style meetings there is far less margin for error – They have to be structured differently and be more systematic – it starts to look a bit like transactional sales performed by a focused Inside Sales.
Watch the Adapting Field Sales To Selling-At-A-Distance webcast and learn how you can adapt your sales playbook.
