MarketStar Blog

There is a reason that the Centers for Disease Control calls COVID-19 a novel coronavirus. We have never seen a virus like this one before, nor have we seen a global pandemic this severe in more than a century. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all of us, especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and your SMB customers need your help more than ever. The challenge is finding the best way to help them through these unusual times.

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing people to spend much more time at home, many are taking the opportunity to get caught up on their reading list. In stressful, uncertain times, picking up a new book or two can be entertaining and even calming. For your sales team, this could even become a time of learning and self-improvement.

The coronavirus pandemic has sent shockwaves across the country, grinding our economy to a standstill and forcing many employees to work from home. In these unprecedented times, establishing a new routine with your sales team can feel challenging. But rest assured: They need your leadership right now. 

Although this crisis has put many industries on hold, others are still as busy as they were before it, in some cases, more busy. In the midst of all this stress and confusion, your team may very well be expected to keep making sales calls, focusing on Customer Success, and hitting their numbers. If that’s the case, then they are likely craving clear, confident guidance to help establish some sense of normalcy—and inspire them to keep up the great work. 

Here, we explore five ways to empower your sales team from home:

For every big customer you land, there are dozens of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) out there that are looking for products exactly like yours. However, most enterprise companies ignore SMB sales, assuming that SMBs are too difficult to sell to and too expensive given the size of their typical contract. 

If you are among those who are overlooking SMB sales, then you are ignoring an untapped market that is hungry for technology.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire world has had to change the way it conducts business virtually overnight. Shelter-in-place orders have been issued in states across the U.S., and businesses are encouraging their people to work from home. This is the time when your Customer Success team really needs to step up to reassure customers and keep the revenue coming in.

If you don’t already have a Customer Success team in place, then you should seriously consider creating one. Unlike customer support, which is reactive following a sale, the Customer Success team is proactive, working with customers to understand their business needs and help them to achieve their business goals.

Times are changing, and so is the way that B2B buyers source new business solutions. This means that you need to rethink your approach to building a sales team. Customers aren’t looking to buy specific products as much as they’re looking for ways to solve business problems. 

As a result, sales territories are fading in favor of selling using vertical market expertise. It’s a buyer’s world, and customers are better educated and want more value and better service, and so building a sales team that can offer better solutions requires a new strategy.

Rapid market changes paired with new and increasingly complex product and service offers means one thing for sales: Adapt and evolve if you want to succeed. So, when it comes to the decision to overhaul your sales team for agility and scale, you have two options: Expand internally or partner up with an outsourced inside sales provider.

Numbers don’t lie, but they can inspire. If you know where to look, you can find thousands of statistics on the web related to sales and selling. Although these statistics can be interesting, they don’t mean much when taken strictly at face value. However, when you start to assimilate data and compare numbers from various sources, you start to see patterns emerge. Then, if you correlate these numbers, some of your findings might make you a much smarter sales rep.

Hiring and training staff is expensive. SHRM (The Society of Human Resource Management) estimates that the cost-per-hire is $4,129, and that replacing an employee can cost between six and nine months of their salary. When you consider the cost of searching, hiring, and training sales personnel, hiring an outside sales team can eliminate talent acquisition headaches.

More companies are using live chat for leads. You are undoubtedly familiar with live chat as a sales and customer service tool. How often have you visited a website looking for information only to see a live chat box pop up in the bottom corner? These chat boxes aren’t sales bots; they are live sales reps looking to provide business-critical information that could turn a curious website visitor into a viable prospect. This is how you apply live chat for leads, and it is changing B2B sales.