Blog

As January 2020 proved, the world can shift on a dime. In a matter of weeks, we went from hearing about a handful of coronavirus deaths to realizing the breadth of the pandemic to going on global lockdown.

As people absorbed the implications of COVID-19, businesses quickly canceled conferences, lunch meetings, live events, tradeshows and face-to-face sales appointments. And yet, while many local restaurants and shops shuttered, B2B business didn’t cease.

With all the disruptions that the Coronavirus pandemic has ushered into our lives in the past several months—the quarantines, the social distancing, the masks—we’re only just beginning to focus on the long-term ramifications. While our lives will get back to normal someday, some changes may be permanent.

For businesses generally and sales organizations specifically, COVID-19 is turning out to be one giant wake-up call. Only a few months ago, digital technologies, virtual sales techniques and flexible/remote work patterns were considered competitive advantages. Now, they are essential.

The last several months have been tough on businesses and employees alike. Even now, while countries are slowly opening up and companies are trying to get back to some form of normalcy, the Coronavirus pandemic is not over.

If your sales cycle has been disrupted by Covid-19, you’re probably hustling to adjust to what many are calling the “New Normal.” While some businesses fear the future, those that have been transitioning to inside sales and telesales have an advantage.

Leads have been the source of a long-standing battle between marketing and sales. Marketing claims that reps don’t follow up on the leads they generate. Salespeople, on the other hand, argue that most leads aren’t worth the time and effort necessary to pursue.

When it comes to developing telemarketing and inside sales managers, some companies make some mistaken assumptions.

Companies put a lot of stock in their inside sales teams, and rightly so. These men and women are the face of a company. They make the calls, engage with prospects, and turn decision-makers into customers. As such, companies invest a lot of time, effort, and money into ensuring their reps have the best possible product training, interpersonal skills and sales savviness to do the job. Then what do they do? They tend to pluck the best producers away from the phones and move them into management.

Selling involves messaging, driving traffic, data management, list building, lead management, lead nurturing and relationship building. And that’s all before you ever get close to closing the sale.

The sophistication and complexity of today’s sales and marketing process require the talent of many specialists. Marketing departments have been integrating more specialists from programmatic advertising and social media professionals to videographers and data scientists. There is, however, a tendency to dump the leads into the laps of inside sales and telesales reps and hope for the best.

How critical is customer experience to competing and winning business in the 21st century? Well consider this:

Gartner is calling customer experience (CX) “the new marketing battlefront.” In 2018, Gartner reported that more than two-thirds of marketers say their companies compete on the mastery of their customer experiences and that within two years, 81% of companies would be competing on CX.

For the past few years, we’ve regularly addressed issues related to account-based marketing (ABM). We’ve looked at the tools and technology, highlighted the successes and dissected some of the challenges.