3 Sales Trends to Prepare for a Post-COVID Reopening

There were updates, there were podcasts and there was a lot of chat. All centered around what the selling environment would look like after the dust settles post COVID-19. For a few industries and products prospects are bright. For others, the dust will not be settling anytime soon. 

In the near term, revenue teams must work under new considerations. 

Post COVID-19 companies need to figure out how to get sales back on track. Pivoting successfully for 2020 comes down to being ready for client’s changed goal orientation, the need for relevant personalization, and the need for increased relationship building efforts.

Trend #1 - Change of Client Goal Orientation

If you are a revenue leader that is in Sales, Marketing or Customer Success, you are feeling the pain. For BDR teams that are doing outbound prospecting, the conversations have gone cold, stone cold. In marketing, lead creation and demand generation has stalled, and in customer success, clients are not increasing spend and are asking for more support. 

In the first weeks of the lockdown Hubsot reported that there was a drop of 20-30% in new deal creation and deal bookings. That is a loss of pipeline and a loss of actual revenue. Teams could not have conversations, could not book meetings, and prospects and client were pausing decisions. Understandably, client’s goals changed. Some outreach efforts were tone deaf. The question asked was, “How can companies possible try to sell something now, in this environment?” The safe assumption that presupposed companies were looking to increase top line revenue, or solve a pain point, was not as clear. 

The new goals are revenue preservation and cost savings.

Of course, businesses have not given up on the goal of getting new revenue. Getting revenue for the second part of the year will be essential as recovery efforts ramp-up. However, they have refocused to make sure that they keep what they have and amplify efficiency. Spending anything can run counter to that focus.  The numbers are starting to improve, though.  In that same report, (from a 700 Hubspot CRM customers sample size), the decline slowly decreased week over week leading to the beginning of May. It is getting better but nowhere near good. We will need to see the analysis of the May figures. Post COVID-19 reopening, teams must be able to craft their communication approach in a way that methodically connects to the current business goal sentiment. 

Tip #1 - Learn to fit your offering into one of these two goals

Trend #2 - The need to become hyper - personalized 

Marketers, salespeople and demand generation specialists have been talking about personalization for a long time. Everything from the embossed company logo portfolios of old, to the “l liked your last post” email lead in of today, all are meant to do one thing – show personalization. The issue is that it all can comes across as forced. I cannot tell you the number of emails I received during this crisis that had one line about COVID-19 in the beginning and then went right into the product offering. As if the sender cut-and-pasted the message.  Not to minimize those efforts, but much of it is automatic, almost transactional. We have commoditized personalization. For some, personalization has become simple platitudes and niceties. Much of this communication has stopped resonating. It can be difficult to be authentic and have a caring tonality.  A recent LinkedIn pool revealed that the majority of BDR and SDR teams have stopped or changed their automatic email cadences.  Those had become a common place in their “tip of the spear” customer acquisition efforts. Sales effectiveness and marketing automation tools did most of the implementation. Now and into our new normal, prospects will be looking for those messages that speak to them, their pain, and their care specifically. We are going to need the idea of research, the time-wasting pastime used to mask call reluctance. Teams must personalize client messaging and personalize sales team training for this shift in strategy moving forward.

Tip #2 - Train teams and develop hyper personalized strategy for omni messaging 

Trend #3 - Improve customer experience through improved relationships

As consumers, we connect the best customer experiences with the best products. Why? We all want to feel important. From the hyper- focus of customer personalization and experience comes the next obvious step – the creation of improved customer relationships. 

A particularly good product might not always seem as the most valuable or best offering to the end users. Customer experience is not the sole domain of a product interface or the post-sale process. The complete journey a client travels, starting at as a prospect and leading to a long-term satisfied customer defines customer experience. From Demand Generation to Customer Success, every layer of customer interaction must add to a deeper customer relationship. 

Technology is helping that first layer touch point with prospects. Teams are using video outreach to a higher degree. Tools such as Vidyard and Loom are going beyond screen share and putting a face and a personality to the sales efforts. More humanity is going into the email and social media interaction as well. Additionally, sales teams are using podcasts, YouTube channels and pop-up LinkedIn webinars to create better relationships with their audiences. For example, I have seen several podcasts started by Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders and even sales reps, that cultivate a following within a field of influence. These interactions have all had unique voices and perspectives that potential and current clients enjoy. It allows audiences to get the added intrinsic value that may help them choose a product, stay with that offering or simply learn something interesting.  These efforts were well underway before COVID-19 but are increasingly effective now. 

Finally, improved GTM (Go-to-Market) strategies will lead to better client relationships. GTM, which covers the Sales and Marketing customer acquisition activities, explained by Upscope here, needs to be dynamic.  The same methods for getting clients are not as reliable as they once were. Structurally, the connection of business development reporting to Marketing can help with GTM viability. Sales teams will need to use marketing to build a relationship with stakeholders while gaining an understanding of target accounts. Jeff Davis, in his book “create togetherness”, discusses the seismic shift in B2B that needs to happen in sales / marketing alignment. As an answer to that growing trend, the Revenue function has become a method to insure cohesive operation. Revenue operation connects Sales, Marketing, Account management and Customer Success into a solid whole.  This new alignment brings everything together in seamless harmony with a unified goal. Some organizations need to implement this approach. Since budgets have shrunk and will stay small for the next several months, those groups need to work together and share resources now more than ever. All of this will cultivate better long-lasting relationships with customers. 

Tip #3 – Align all functions within revenue and strengthen customer relationships  

So to be prepared for an economic re-opening in a post COVID-19 sales environment, revenue creation teams need to adapt. Sales need to be prepared for changed customer goals, a renewed need for relevant personalization, and for the push by prospects to develop deeper relationships.

Nate Blackburn is an blogger/ vlogger, trainer and public speaker. He was formally the Vice President of Sales at Acquirent, the leading Managed Sales Services firm, overseeing Sales and Customer Success. His teams included managers that led a 100+ member org of BDR's, AE's and Account Managers working on behalf of client accounts. Clients included SaaS startups as well as Fortune 1000 companies. Currently Nate is consulting Sales Leaders and sales teams to better leverage data, technology and creative emotional intelligence for improved results.