Sales Strategy for your Business during COVID-19
In an environment marked by a global pandemic and market volatility, advocating for sales and growth might seem like a lost cause to some. However, note that it’s bad times like these when you can acquire a customer that can last a lifetime, or get a jumpstart on your business over others who might be facing greater challenges due to the crisis. For some this might seem like a disaster, for others, this creates a level playing ground.
This article is not to promote profiteering, rather aims at advocating opportunistic behavior. It aims at helping you cut through all the noise and despondent updates and encourages you to focus on what you can do to ensure sales continuity and adjust to this new reality.
It’s time to adapt to the crisis. So here goes.
Stay calm and patient
2020 started off with a bang, and many of us saw this year as potentially our greatest year ever. Markets were moving and everything was merry. And then boom! Overnight, things came to a halt.
It’s scary for sure. Many companies have been forced to virtual work environments, and adversity is all around. And all our kids are home from school 24/7. That’s something.
COVID-19 will pass eventually, yes. And we all know this. So hold your ground and stay calm and patient. In times of crisis, when others retreat (such as through reducing staff, hours or operations), or are anxious to make their moves, holding your ground can actually give you an advantage.
There is an abundance of information out there on how to keep the virus at bay. Other sources will give you tips to work from home or will teach you yoga movements to stay active throughout the day. So take some time out and browse. Experiment and understand what works for you - to keep you calm and positive.
Like one of our advisors says, “problems are opportunities”. Look for those opportunities. Clever investors, business leaders, and salespeople look at downturns in markets as opportunities to find new ways, new solutions, new markets, and customers. There are more opportunities than you think.
Communicate with your clients
Communicate! You must have noticed how easy it is to get spooked in times of crisis and uncertainty. The more you communicate with the people around you, the better off you are at this time. Communicating and updating your clients is one of the top things you should focus on.
Let them know that you are working on ways to keep things going — such as managing supply, keeping them up-to-date, making it easier to get access to important information, et cetera. Show them how they can keep buying from you — for example, online ordering, digital meetings, virtual presentations, and pitches. Be proactive about communicating what is possible and what isn’t during this time.
As trust can fade and panic can spread faster than any virus, it is critical to nurture trust, reliability, and consistency through any crisis.
Communicate with your prospects
Sales has always been transactional. You reach out to people to start a relationship, then you nurture that relationship to convert it into business and money. This has always been the (short-sighted) strategy - and one that is unfortunate. And with the crisis, this short-sighted strategy has gone even worse. Salespeople don’t think of prospects as relationships that need to be nurtured over decades, and that will pay dividends over decades if nurtured correctly.
Take this situation as an opportunity to adjust the strategy. If you treat your prospects as long-term business relationships, you’re going to get more money and long-term benefits. Then, the longer you are ‘in business’, the more money you’ll be making, and the easier it will be to make that money.
Work on building valuable relationships for the future with your prospects. True, these relationships won’t get you any money this quarter, but you’d be surprised how quickly things could change.
Continuing to sell
Let’s face it, there is no workaround to this. When your back is against the wall, you sell. As Mark Cuban says “SALES CURES ALL”. And with this crisis, we are all going to have to change gears and change almost everything as we go along. Unfortunately, we don’t have the leverage to stop doing business. So call upon your human creativity, ingenuity, and community spirit to keep the wheels of your business going.
Below, we came up with 4 tips that we thought might be helpful.
Find the buyer, don’t sell
If you have ever sold, you know that there really is a major difference in someone who is a buyer, and someone who is being sold. You can be awesome at sales, but trust me, you will be better off doing it the other way around - especially now.
This approach has less to do with the product or service, and more to do with WHO you are dealing with. This requires focusing on others and not just yourself.
Even in the current situation, buyers out there are actively looking for your product, service, or offering to improve their business, quality of life, or to solve a major problem they have. Strategically locate those buyers, be overly cautious with why, and how you reach out to your prospects and see this approach working sensations for you.
Great time to set up an inside sales team
Right now, and for the foreseeable future, in-person sales is dead. If you relied on ‘walking the corridors’ or ‘people on the ground’, you must be struggling with continuing to sell without your core lead generator. Well, it’s time to modify.
Inside sales is the new reality, and now is one of the best times to build a team. With unemployment levels reaching a new high this is the most suitable time to hire great talent who are professionally hit by this virus. It’s almost impossible to over-emphasize the efficiencies and cost benefits of building an inside sales team. Consider this sales prospecting statistics - how many sales calls a traveling field rep can make in a day compared with the number of calls an inside sales rep can make.
If you already have an inside sales team, it will serve to unite inside sales, ground sales, and marketing teams. Encourage an empathy-driven approach, and promote personalized message delivery to high-value leads.
Content marketing
Content marketing to create a steady stream of inbound leads is nothing new. But now, more than ever, you need to start taking it seriously.
Start by defining your goals and mission for content-driven sales. Examples can be “creating brand awareness, expanding your customer email list,” et cetera. As a next step, identify where your target audience hangs out online. Once you have recognized where your audience visits the most, you will have a firm grasp on where to reach them.
Finally, figure the type of content your audience will like - it is a content marketing strategy after all. For example, if your audience spends most of their time on Instagram, focus on creating visually stunning images. For Facebook, produce captivating videos. If they are avid LinkedIn users, concentrate more on informational articles and whitepapers. Finally, track your results. Identify measurable KPIs and measure growth
You can also align your content strategy with an Account-based Sales Strategy. This has worked wonders for us in the last few weeks. Help your team create tailored content for targeted accounts - trust us, your target market is looking out for content to upgrade their skills or solve problems. During COVID-19, content should address the urgent problems that your customers face. That’s why sales reps need to sit down with marketing to discover the practical solutions that customers need.
Learn to sell on LinkedIn
Sales, in general, is all about connecting, and for some, it is all about connecting on Linkedin. LinkedIn can be a great lead generation platform—if you use it wisely and avoid sending spammy, irrelevant, generic template-driven messages.
Using Linkedin as a form of outreach is great because it’s complementary to cold email and hits your prospects on a different channel that might be less crowded than their inbox. With LinkedIn, you will find that people respond and interact with outreach quite differently. While a cold email is a much more direct sales pitch, a LinkedIn engagement is much more of a conversation.
As a starting point, optimize your Linkedin profile so it’s designed to convert profile views into conversations. Then, the standard flow - identify the right audience, reach out sensibly, and get conversations going.
Balance work and health
This period in history requires a heavy game of mental toughness. That toughness means being patient, keeping an optimistic perspective, and continuing to work like a champion. Know that this isn’t the end. It’s an epic opportunity to evolve, grow, and conquer. Don’t stop doing what you do. You just may have to adjust the way you are doing it, or who you are doing it for.
Try to stay level-headed and to assess pragmatically what can be done to hold your ground, or even progress into new opportunities without putting your business at risk.
So keep the doors open and find ways to keep on selling and doing business. Times are definitely different, but this isn’t the end. It’s an epic opportunity to evolve, grow, and conquer.
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