Guest article provided by: Nicole Gallicchio, COO and Paula La Rocca, HR Specialist Turning Point HCM
What types of issues are your clients facing?
Is it appropriate to sell during a global pandemic?
Or should you relax your budgets?
Struggling with these questions…
The bottom line is – you likely need to exponentially increase your sales and marketing efforts, especially during this crisis. Sales drive cash flow, as a sales leader you have the responsibility to ensure liquidity of your company thereby protecting your company operations as a whole, as well as its team, your team. As such it is critical to continue making sales calls.
The main shift in mindset we need to undergo, however, is to reframe the message in a manner that demonstrates empathy. Reorient yourself to serve your customers depending on the state of their business. Lead with a message that you care about your customers – ask how they are doing, what their business practices are, how they are managing to practice social distancing, how they are solving their organizational problems – tell them that you are available to serve them. What issues are they facing and how can your services benefit them exponentially.
Some tips to help you get started here:
- Demonstrate this empathy further by focusing your discussion on improving their profitability – has their industry stalled?
- Are they managing a baseline of business? Or are they growing through this crisis?
- What does their team environment look like? Are they now remote?
- Looking for ways to remain and sustain profitability will be of the utmost importance to your clients.
Your job is going to be to fill the vacuum of the unknown for your clients. It is time to work with your marketing team to collate hard data on the measurable and tangible benefits that your product or solution has on client profitability. Share this openly, show them, prove it to them through testimonials, individual video chats, pre-recorded video messages or live stream webinars. This is an opportunity to be innovative and entrepreneurial. You must go to your customers – they will not be coming to you.
Now, this will not work with all clients, but it will – at the very least – position you well as a vendor of choice to get their business in the future. Build the right habits and right reputation for recovery. Plan for future marketing and have marketing processes and strategies in place for the unknown that can occur within the next year.
On a personal note, you may be experiencing a significant level of instability in your own company. Again, it is time to double down on your efforts to secure your own future.
Step up and ensure your manager knows you will do whatever it takes to keep business operating, by logging all of the above sales call activity in your CRM – ramp it up! Show indisputable proof that your goal is to protect your business and are willing to do the work to achieve this.
Finally, now more than ever, consumers are making decisions with companies that are demonstrating corporate social responsibility. Be aware of the commitments your own company has or has not made to its team – consumers are watching how companies are treating their own team to a heightened degree during this time.
Photo Credit: Unsplash