ask the expert

How can you grow your business in a pandemic?

2020’s relentless uncertainty has created instability in many sectors. Yet, some businesses are seemingly able to execute powerful growth strategies and land-grab a large share of new business during the turmoil. So, what’s happening on the new business front and how can you grow during Covid-19?

Ryan Welmans

CEO SoPro

SoPro is a powerful sales prospecting platform, established only five years ago, that has witnessed exceptional growth. It is now a key new business channel for over 500 businesses. SoPro helps them identify prospects and then engage them with personalised emails, optimised by smart tech and expertise. With our platform clients can produce deep analysis of their prospecting.

So, we’ve taken a look at what happened to prospecting conversions to leads for our clients and SoPro’s own sales data for the periods before, during and after the first lockdown.

These five lessons will help any business optimise its new business strategy for future lockdowns.

1: Make the right adjustments and lead rates won’t suffer

Perhaps surprisingly, our prospecting campaigns for clients still generated about the same number of leads, despite the fastmoving situation in March-May.

Our prospecting campaigns in February and March 2020 both drove more leads than October, November or December in 2019.

2: Prospecting is still scaleable

One of the advantages prospecting has over other sales channels is that it is agile and scalable; you can easily adjust campaign volumes to increase or decrease the lead flow. But would this hold true in the lockdown period?

Starting in April, we decided to increase the number of people we were engaging.

Our prospecting leads instantly increased for that month – a trend that has continued as we head towards the end of the year.

3: Lockdown doubles ‘Lead to sale’ timings

If we look at how long leads are taking to convert to sales, a clear trend is visible.

We split SoPro’s sales timeline into lockdown and non-lockdown periods.

In the non-lockdown periods, it took our sales team an average of 36.9 days to close each sale.

However, during lockdown they took an astonishing 72 days to close, nearly double the amount of time.

The reality is that during uncertainty, prospects, like everyone, need more time to evaluate options and they need more assurances in order to commit.

4: Lockdown increases conversion

Ready for the shocker? How did lockdown impact our conversion rates?

First, the comparative stats. In the three months before lockdown our sales leads converted at 7.8%, and 8.1% in the three months after lockdown. Pretty consistent.

The leads we generated during lockdown converted at 9.5% – a conversion rate almost 22% higher than the preceding 3 months.

Our jaws hit the floor when we saw these figures. We had been under the impression that lead conversion had reduced severely during the lockdown. However, the reduced sales levels were simply due to our time to close doubling.

Customers took far longer to sign… but ultimately conversion increased.

5: Revenue impact for 2020

In April, the leads we created during lockdown made up 93% of all sales. So, if we had stopped prospecting, we’d now have a three-month hole in our 2020 revenue.

By October 2020, SoPro sales would have be down 25% if we had stopped prospecting during the Lockdown.

So, my advice is don’t stop looking for new business. Definitely review your sales and marketing channels to ensure they reflect new working habits and the channels your B2B audiences, in particular, are using.

Our sales data shows social prospecting has thrived during lockdown. So, make sure you’re maximising your chances of survival with a solution that offers proven engagement success, scalability to meet your needs and the smartest tech to minimise the demand on you, while maximising the new revenue it creates.

We’ve also created a C-19 resources centre at www.sopro.io that includes over 50 sector specific reports on the impact of lockdown and the most successful prospecting techniques. There are also advisory blogs and videos to help businesses adapt and grow during these difficult times.