While the saying goes “You win some and you lose some”, I think the progressing lockdown caused due the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is making the latter all the more prominent, especially when it comes to sales. And even then, we would like to draw wisdom from it – we always learn. Let’s see how such learning can relate to business development and your sales team.
- Spend quality time qualifying your prospects
We’ve witnessed the kind of toll COVID-19 has taken on mankind. So much so that umpteen measures are being taken up at identifying and filtering out the infected from the healthy. This exercise is helping contain the virus & the healthcare personnel know where to divest their time and efforts. The sales process too has a high resemblance to this.
As it is, people are experiencing burnout during these WFH times. What was manageable in a span of 8-9 hours during work hours earlier (whether in your own office or the customer’s), is no longer a fact since the last 2 months. We are all restricted to the confines of our own homes and governed by the practice of social distancing. So, it has truly become gruelsome to prospect just over the phone, and manage client relationships telephonically. It is critical to identify who qualifies for your time, money, and resources. Just like how hospitals are not prioritizing typical OPD cases and are only admitting the most critically ill patients, even businesses need to be selective.
Given our limitations in WFH scenarios, especially prospecting, we should also be selective in whom we pick. Some things you could consider are –
- Planning a different pitch, which proposes value in the current times
- Creating an emailer that hints at your value proposition
- Your emailer should be able to evoke some response; because now, you are relying on that to gauge potential (while this can happen during normal times too, we don’t really depend heavily only on email for prospecting do we?)
Try to weave a message around customer pain areas and how responding to you might be worth their time. Classify the responses you get and then plan on how to prospect.
- Sift pessimism from your approach
Physical distancing is proving to be really effective in avoiding the virus. In short the less you interact with ill, contaminated people and things, the better your chances of staying healthy.
Similarly, keep away from negative thoughts and experiences and don’t let that puncture your self-confidence. We all must acknowledge that sales is a tough job and therefore consciously do not allow rejections and no-deals break down your self-confidence. it is imperative to separate who you are from what you do. Don’t let the day-to-day routine of your role affect your belief in yourself – let in not depress you. Just like we’re wearing masks to stay protected, wear a mask of positive attitude and perseverance with every new prospecting effort.
- Distribute your potential cases – maintain balance
From the time the COVID-19 virus has been doing the rounds, everything is in a lockdown except for health facilities and essential goods. Everything else is non-operational and despites such precautions, the hospitals are nearly full of new COVID admissions. This means that such precautionary measures are critical to ensure some sort of balanced spread of vital resources or else our hospitals are going to be overburdened big time (which was true for so many). So if this lockdown is slowing the progress and spread of the virus, it is also ensuring that the system is prepared/equipped to take on additional cases effectively.
It is likewise with sales. In all probability, we observe sales people function in ups and downs – sometimes they are soaring and then suddenly there’s a slump. This is because of the initial prospecting effort which churns some pipeline and then they get so busy with that pipeline that they forget the most important task in sales – churning more prospects. This causes ups & downs, as against a much desirable balanced funnel, which is possible committing yourself to doing a little bit of prospecting daily, consistently.
A balance by being consistent in your effort will lead to sustainable business growth versus the undesirable ups & downs.
In this article, we’ve tried our best to see how we can learn, from what we see around us and thought let us draw positive inspirations, from the changes we have been witnessing since the COVID-19 outbreak. It will be long before life is normal again, but do we really want to wait? Endlessly? Execore Spectrum encourages you to take on new perspectives, be positive and move ahead with confidence.
