What has been the biggest COVID driven change in the way you do sales?
How has COVID impacted new business generation and led to a change in the modus operandi or process of your sales?
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The obvious one. No more flying to meet people. Everything is done virtually. This makes for a better lifestyle but there are things lost as well. One generally learns more in social interactions and dinners than in formal presentations and structured discussions.
With one of our main customers we have begun doing stretches together whenever a meeting goes more than thirty minutes.
We are also creating more online learning, mostly in the microlearning style. We are just getting started with this, we have a program on Pricing Scenarios and Pricing Action Portfolios that has had a good response. We are now planning additional microlearning courses.
I believe we have also become more data driven. With fewer social touchpoints we are looking more to the datas. We thought we were data driven before (after all, several of us have Phds in data analysis and visualization) but in fact we were only scratching the surface.
But I don't believe data can replace or generate the same insights as social interactions. I may be old fashioned though, and I am exploring this with some of the millenials on our team.
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Hey Steven,
Agree, virtual meetings is a major adapt, companies, including mine, have made to connect with the customers.
So will it be this way in the future, leaving the physical meet and greet ways behind?
Asumming this will also lead to a drop in the sales and marketing costs, especially the ones related to travel, will it prove to be more cost effective in the long run?
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Also Steven, regarding your point about data over social interactions, I believe it is the convergence of the two that will help businesses better understand their customer. And I am saying this because I am seeing this happen where brands are using my software for mining social conversations and deriving actionable insights (for on ground efforts, in some cases).
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@Meldon Morais In our case we have not actually reduced marketing investments, but have rather redirected them to content creation and social media interaction. If one was cynical one could say that this is an example, but I get a lot out of interacting with people in this sort of forum.
I am not sure what the long term impact would be. I would model this using a scenario planning approach if it was critical to my business. My gut feeling is that in person meetings will return but not to the level of the past and in most cases a virtual meeting will be seen as a reasonable aternative.
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