The virtual outlook

SET FOR THE NEW VIRTUAL WORLD

It’s official: 2020 saw the biggest hit to the UK economy in 300 years. The pandemic continues but so does business, and there’s no shortage of advice and tools for the sales organisation, as MARC BEISHON reports

Only 10 years ago we were in the aftermath of the Great Recession and a lengthy spell of austerity was on its way, at least in the UK. The economy, while subdued, slowly improved and was ticking over well with low unemployment, albeit with ongoing productivity and wage stagnation issues, and uncertainty about Brexit. But while “boom and bust” scenarios of various severity are a pattern, nothing in the post-WW2 period has been like the pandemic of 2020 and its stubborn continuation in 2021.

The speed of this change has placed severe pressure on many company managers, who have had to react fast to what can only be called a crisis.

Before looking at strategies and priorities for the salesforce now, what is the business outlook and which sectors are doing best? The obvious paradox of the pandemic has been record stock market gains on some exchanges while a large swathe of the economy is on its knees, especially sectors such as transport and hospitality, and there have been major rises in unemployment and decreases in national GDPs. The UK economy shrank 9.9% in 2020 – the worst fall in 300 years.

It seems like a puzzle but is explained by factors such as the concentration of well-performing stocks in the indexes, near zero interest rates and backing for private bond markets, the bias towards the better-off holding stocks, and a forward looking (and probably over-optimistic) outlook.

If you are a fund manager it hardly takes much insight to know where to invest as it has been obvious that sectors such as technology and online retailing were going to do well. The share price of the ubiquitous Zoom conferencing firm has zoomed up from $90 last February to more than $400 now, although it did reach a peak of about $570 at one point. The price of Bitcoin has gone through the roof. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Alphabet (Google) are huge companies that are just getting bigger. Netflix has added millions of subscribers. There has actually been a boom in companies going public in Europe.

A lot of other industries have been more or less pandemic proof. Utilities, construction, support services, manufacturing and professional services are among them to greater or lesser degrees. Pharmaceuticals is another obvious winner given the vaccines story although generally healthcare may have slowed down as people have avoided some care. When the pandemic tails off – and it looks like a long haul – there will be sectors that will build on current success, such as e-commerce and logistics, home fitness, gaming and so on.

All companies will have their own take on how their markets have changed, but there are other core factors that have been ongoing anyway, such as the move to greener economies and the introduction of technologies that will underpin many operations (including selling of course), such as artificial intelligence and 5G mobile.

LESSONS FROM 2020 Last year we published a number of articles in Winning Edge on strategies to respond to the pandemic. Our last issue majored on resilience, a quality that is even more essential in sales teams and individuals. Putting employees first has also been vital to ensuring people can perform in remote working – which is here to stay for many of us – and smart firms have been communicating well with staff, making adjustments to targets according to pressure at home, and creating new types of incentives. This may be a time when non-financial rewards come to the fore in attracting and retaining staff, such as training and career development opportunities, and making work more exciting and challenging.

Sales enablement technology is also coming to the fore given the limitations on face-to-face customer interactions. Companies are having to improve content creation, “findability” and new sales communications routes. Salespeople must be given the tools to do their jobs.

Peter Colman’s articles in particular majored on crisis management, including a map that plotted demand against your go to market model, with the advice: “We believe the key to surviving this crisis is commercial agility: to make resilient pricing, product/service design, sales, and cost management decisions with unprecedented speed and flexibility – over and over again – until some form of stability returns to your market.” He recommended setting up a team to work across

Virtual sets for your PC, courtesy of the BBC. From top left: Porridge, Eastenders, Dr Who, Match of the Day. Download here functions to find new ways of doing things; avoiding thinking things will go back to normal; safeguarding time for engaging with customers and issues rather than firefighting; and not caving on pricing (and instead consider price increase campaigns if your costs are rising, say because of Brexit). Offering other kinds of value or discounts related to performance are angles. In fact, a crisis can be a positive force to a make overdue changes to say get to grips with cross-selling, target new sectors, introduce new brands and not least target the customers of firms that are less agile.

Jim Irving (and see his article on page 30) also notes that during a crisis, value becomes even more important and is the key to opening doors when people are under stress – you need to get their time and attention. He also advises seeking out people who have been through previous crises and learning from them – experience is a vital commodity.

A GOOD TIME FOR CHANGE? The idea of using the pandemic to making changes to sales organisations is one echoed by a number of other commentators. Harvard Business Review, for example, ran an article recently titled, “Now is the time to shake up your sales processes”, by a group at consulting firm ZS Associates. They say that major changes to sales are often disruptive and can cause damage to customer relations and threaten salespeople’s own sense of worth, so they are often not done until events force managers to act. But a

crisis does make people more receptive to change.

The B2C world has led the way in digital, online buying for some time, and it has shaped the expectations of B2B buyers too. But B2B sales organisations have been slow to make changes to processes, partly through resistance from the traditional field salesforce. It is noteworthy though that before the pandemic there was also a longrunning trend towards investing in inside sales as B2B buyers shifted towards online research and engagement, and it could well be that companies that have a strong inside sales unit have been better equipped to cope now.

But it is the scale and speed of change that is unprecedented. As Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella has said: “We saw two years of digital transformation in two months.” The ZS consultants look to be spot on with their prescription: “The key is to align in-person sales channels with buying complexity and buyer uncertainty.” It means on the one hand, implementing straightforward buying steps for customers who are comfortable with virtual situations, and who are well on their way to knowing what they want, versus knowing when to bring in more experienced salespeople in complex deals with lots of decision makers. This is the same as it’s long been but needs to be translated into a virtual world. As Gartner, the analyst, says, it’s about removing complexity and making things easy for buyers (see also panel, right).

Apart from process it may be necessary to restructure the salesforce into more appropriate roles, and sadly also to downsize, if not already

PANDEMIC PRIORITIES

What are the top three initiatives that are most critical to the success over the next 6 months?

Accelerating early pipeline Sales enablement (tools etc.) Effective key accounts Sales organisation redesign Customer retention/loyalty Mapping digital buying Sales analytics Aligning with other functions Rethinking customer segments 29% 28% 26% 22% 22% 21% 16% 41% 49%

Indirect channel partners Cost efficiencies (eg. in e-commerce) Adjusting compensation plans 15%

12%

9%

Cost cutting (eg. in training) Other 6% 4%

Source: CSO Insights done, and Peter Colman has noted that it is best to tackle this head on and not make promises that are pretty certain to be broken later. But some industries are growing and taking on salespeople, such as technology firms selling cloud services. Roles also may need to focus on the magic words – value selling – as well as being fluent in digital skills.

In turn this will affect the incentive structure. The ZS consultants make several points – if matching pay to value, inside sales, which may be doing better than field sales, could be due a rise; pay mix could shift to a larger salary and less from incentives and also more for team-based performance; and aligning plans with overall sales goals could work better, perhaps emphasising certain products over others. Again, see Jim Irving’s “complan” article in page 30 for more on this.

VIRTUAL REALITY CSO Insights, now part of Gartner, has weighed in with a survey of chief sales officers, albeit a fairly small sample. The graph on this page shows that these sales execs have put accelerating early pipeline efforts and enabling virtual selling at the top of the list of initiatives that are impacting sales success.

The second is not surprising, as the respondents were also asked how prepared they are to deliver the same level of value though virtual engagements as they were before the onset of Covid-19, and 57% said they were only partially prepared or unprepared. The focus on accelerating pipeline implies that new business is a primary aim but the sales chiefs also reported that they expected more revenue (70%) to come from existing customers post-Covid than before, although it isn’t a big leap from 66% before.

Certainly, hunting for new customers is necessary but more challenging, especially for those firms that have lost much business from their existing base. CSO Insights says that efforts to enable virtual selling is intricately tied to acquiring new customers, so these top two aims go together logically. Companies have tried to address the challenge with a mix of approaches such as creating virtual meeting playbooks and FAQ documents, to using training and coaching methods to instil the requisite skills. Some organisations are also considering hiring “digital natives” to help with virtual sales.

While it’s all well and good focusing on driving digital dexterity in social media, virtual call planning and execution, and the like, there is a problem, and it’s that an overreliance on reps as the primary sales channel is at odds with changing buyer behaviours, who now use your website as well as your reps depending on what they are buying, and younger buyers (millennials) may well prefer to do their buying with little or no interaction with sales reps. Now we’ve heard many times about the shift to decisions made much earlier in the buying cycle,

and undoubtedly this long predates the pandemic but its extent has not been that well demonstrated.

But virtual customer meetings must be organised and run well, and almost every sales consultancy and technology supplier has piled in with advice on how to do so. CSO Insights is one that has gone into detail on an optimal virtual approach, which means doing some things rather differently than most do currently. For example, it’s important not to assume the same stakeholders will be on subsequent live interactions so that needs to be managed; agendas need to be more “narrowly scoped”; buyer enablement materials should be prepared for participants rather than just agreeing next steps; and so on.

The salesforce needs training in skills important for virtual interactions, and of course in the technologies used – you don’t want your star salesperson suddenly turning into a cat although it may be a talking point that wins the day.

TRANSPARENTLY OBVIOUS? Another analyst, Forrester, has produced an interesting report, “Winning the new B2B buyer”. There’s nothing startling about the changes it charts, but put together they look compelling. Buyers have increased access to critical purchasing information such as pricing, performance, and perceived value; younger buyers, in particular, are shifting behaviour to prefer peer insights and validation over vendor claims; there’s increased demand for self-service; and while the long-term impacts of social distancing and the pandemic are hard to foresee, Forrester predicts there will be a lasting effect on work patterns that impacts all buyers, offerings and markets.

That second point – about peer insights – is striking as there is research from Sirius Decisions that shows that customer references or testimonials have grown greatly in influencing decision-making in just the past 5 years or so. This suggests that customers are looking for quick confirmation of good or bad experience in a similar way to consumers using sites such as Trustpilot, and the information on B2B sites is likely to be more reliable and thorough.

Forrester also says B2B buyers want access to a much wider range of information, including pricing, business practices and policies, market feedback, sales channel/route choices, delivery options, and ongoing customer experience and results. They also want knowledgeable sellers of course, but they want consistency from all the various people they contact at a vendor. And they expect it all to be fast at every touchpoint.

Being more open about pricing and product roadmaps is part of this, backed up by a solid data security protocol that works for both sides – this must be a factor when parties are communicating VIRTUALLY ALL THERE IS

n According to Gartner, the key to accelerating growth for B2B sales is a “low-effort, digital buying experience” that helps customers feel more confident about their decisions. It means understanding how buyers are using both digital and human channels, often simultaneously, and the analyst says you need to look at your go-to-market strategy – perhaps even removing the distinctions between sales, marketing and customer service entirely, where all commercial resources are unified in one commercial operations team. n Running virtual sales meetings with the salesforce needs a rethink, especially if people are suffering from “Zoom fatigue”. Allego, a learning and sales content specialist, has produced an e-book, “Rethinking the national sales meeting”, which should give you ideas about revamping such meetings in a virtual world. n Korn Ferry (which bought Miller Heiman), has a report, “Social distancing without sales disruption”. It notes that most B2B buyers just don’t see salespeople as a resource for solving their business problems, and puts forward the idea of “perspective selling”, which sounds like insight selling, and needs to be applied to create valid business reasons for virtual meetings, and in which new content strategies are a must, new ways of networking must be explored, and the time freed up for salespeople best deployed. n McKinsey is nothing if not dramatic: Covid-19 has changed B2B sales forever, it says, in a recent article. Its research on decision makers’ behaviour globally across industries since the crisis began reveals that the big digital shift is here to stay. About 75% of buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement Only about 20% of B2B buyers say they hope to return to in-person sales, even in sectors where field-sales models have traditionally dominated, such as pharma and medical products.

virtually. Few organisations, though, reference data security in their corporate social responsibility reports. Forrester also mentions something that seems old fashioned but is still relevant – the emotional response of customers to your brand, which means not just putting products first all the time.

Technology for collaboration with customers and partners, unifying data on prospects, self-service e-commerce, “chatbots” and all that other good stuff puts pressure on firms less savvy with tech to compete, but the good news is that it needn’t be expensive in cost, but may be in time and training.

Are we rushing in the new virtual world to big changes such as full price transparency, mostly risk-reward contracts and the like? The analysts like to talk up the speed of such change but even with things not moving so fast there’s a world of change.

As Bain & Company notes, by 2029, “circular economies” are expected to replace linear economies (it cites Gartner on this). It’s a move from transactional relationships based on selling products to a model of production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing and recycling existing materials and products, and is driven by sustainability. It’s as plausible as electric cars...

REFERENCES Harvard Business Review (2020). Now is the time to shake up your sales processes. CSO Insights (2020). The chief sales officer. Fourth quarter 2020. Bain & Company (2020). Ten technology trends moving into 2021. Forrester (2020). Winning the new B2B buyer. Gartner (2021). Gartner says a low-effort, digital buying experience is the key to accelerating revenue growth for B2B sales organisations. Allego (2020). Rethinking the national sales meeting. Korn Ferry/Miller Heiman (2020). Social distancing without sales disruption. McKinsey (2020). How Covid-19 has changed B2B sales forever.

Acrystal ball would have been a great gift at the start of last year, but learning to adapt, think creatively and respond rapidly are all skills that have been improved in response to the pandemic. This year finds us more prepared, sales muscles toned, skillset improved, and attitudes more determined. So what are the key factors?

VIDEO

As the global situation unfolded in early 2020, sharp-thinking sales teams quickly embraced the use of video, which became an essential part of the sales process. Fast forward to today and video is here to stay. It allows you to stand out, improving engagement both in the initial contact and the closing stages. It has been proved to accelerate sales deals.

VIRTUAL SELLING

Covid-19 has changed almost everything, from the way we prospect for potential customers to how we work with existing clients. Virtual selling will continue to be a key to success, long after the virus. There’s no going back, both in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

REMOTE WORKING

The pandemic has forced a change in traditional attitudes towards working from home. The UK’s Office for National Statistics showed that almost 50% of adults in employment in 2020 were working from home as a result of social distancing measures. This number is expected to continue its upwards trajectory over the next 3 years.

Although some business owners are still concerned that, unwatched, the productivity of some employees will suffer, in general the opposite has proved to be the case. Morale, motivation, a sense of freedom, and ultimately productivity, are generally stronger among remote workers.

In 2020, the ability to adapt, consider changes and act quickly was crucial. Sales organisations made rapid shifts in their methods to take advantage of remote communication methods. Don’t expect this to reverse in the years to come. Personal contact, when possible, will remain an important part of sales, but it will probably never resume the place it once had, especially when the creativity and technical expertise of the best sales teams can offer the same service remotely.

RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING

Can sales professionals still build authentic relationships? Absolutely. Forming meaningful bonds with prospects should always be a priority and if they continue to strengthen relationships through video, there is no reason why this cannot

INSIGHT

SALES TRENDS

become just as effective. Aim to build rapport and trust just as you would face-to-face.

TOOLS

FINDING YOUR Remote working does pose challenges, WAY especially for those who do better with frequent social contact. It’s easy to start ploughing your own furrow without giving the rest of the team a glance to check that your direction is the same as theirs. The opportunity to chat informally and exchange ideas online remains

Jonathan Finch essential, both for motivation, and to keep businesses and individual salespeople on the same track. The suggests how to flourish on right communication methods and tools are key to giving businesses a window on what people are doing, and to help them work productively. They your 2021 will achieve more if directives are clear. sales journey EMPATHY If ever there was a time when empathy and effort to understand the situation of others are important, it is now. In 2020, businesses shut at an unprecedented rate. This, alongside significant personal trauma, means that a caring attitude in the sales process is essential, and even when Covid-19 becomes less of a factor, empathy will still be important, impacting on the psychological approach needed when dealing with customers. If your sales practices have been ethical and empathetic and you continue to stay up-to-date with the challenges, you are on the path to success.

JONATHAN FINCH (FISM) is group sales director of Sales Geek. He works alongside sales professionals and sales leaders from across the UK, assisting them with growth planning, recruitment planning, retention strategies, and virtual and physical training plans. Visit salesgeek.co.uk

CHANGE

The business landscape will continue to change – of course it will, it always has. After the disruption of 2020, there may be a reluctance to plan ahead in the expectation that the best laid plans are pointless when the situation can change so rapidly. Yet planning is still essential as this year unfolds. The difference should lie in the increased level of flexibility you exercise to adapt your plans when the need arises, alongside the ability to think creatively to remain on top of your game. Take the advice of American life coach Tony Robbins, who says, “Stay committed to your decision, but flexible in your approach.” Have a great year.