Biggest Sales Learnings from the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic

Staff WritersB2B technologySales & MarketingSales Coaching

By Paroma Sen On Jan 28, 2021

Biggest Sales Learnings from the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has turned attention to a lot of crucial aspects in everyday work-life, including in everyday sales and marketing processes! The most successful sales leaders and business leaders the world over have been those who have understood market shifts and pre-empted change and demand in time to adapt their processes and sales structures (and sales technologies) effectively.

There have a lot of innovative learnings and success stories from 2020, despite what the Covid-19 health pandemic led to in terms of business, economic and lifestyle challenges. Let’s dive into a few top sales learnings from the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic today:

A Nice Looking Saas Product Versus An Important One: It’s not just Sales and Marketing Positioning that Matters

We’ve already spoken about the importance of technology innovators and SaaS providers focusing on identifying a steady product roadmap, to not only build out a relevant team structure, but to also understand the difference between product need and demand, from the market point of view. More than half of today’s tech startups fail to succeed because of a mismatch between product-market fit.

What does that mean for today’s technology sales and marketing environment though? When the world is moving through a health pandemic: consumers in B2B and B2C don’t necessarily need a nice looking product.

The focus shifts toward need based investments during a challenging time, across industries. For sales and marketing leaders and most of all, for technology product developers (founders!) to stay afloat, what matters is honing down into what makes their product a must-need or must-have, given the current business and economic challenges.

Every Company Needs To Pull Up Customer Data, Using a Method that Identifies with their own Product and Sales Process

The saying once size does not fit all applies to everything in the market today: hiring, marketing, sales and even when it comes to collecting customer data, it is now crucial for companies to understand what kind of customer information is most relevant to them, where they can get it from and how they disperse it to the main member of the team using a centralized system that also protects all this data.

The rise of online sales processes also mean that sales and marketing leaders have many more sources from which to gather customer data and insights on customer behaviors. The right sales leadership tactics involves narrowing down on the most effective channels because that data is what matters most to improving or shortening the sales cycle for a product or service.

Face-To-Face In-Person Meetings And Events Can Be A Waste Of Resources

If you had to sit back and think of the time, money and effort that sales and marketing teams who used to rely on traditional events and physical meetings saved through 2020, all of it amounts to a lot. Stronger sales technologies teamed with effective modern-day sales processes have successfully proven that face to face in-person meetings and the traditional need for sales directors to hop onto a flight for customer meetings can be done away with.

Adapting to this process also allows sales and marketing to find new ways to understand and interact with their customers using online surveys, interactive bots, engaging videos (TikTok!), to replace these traditional meeting model.

These resources, when saved can be effectively used to boost corporate sustainability initiatives, improve training and salestech processes and investments while also reinvesting in company growth.

Pivoting To A Digital-First Sales And Marketing Model, With A Bit Of Traditional Efficiencies In Place

It was time for the role of the typical B2B salesperson to change…over the years, the rise of salestech has shown just how much. Field sales teams (who now need to adapt to Inside sales roles more) are just one example here. While sales and marketing leaders have adapted to strong remote sales processes during this time, it is still integral to retain some elements of a traditional approach (Direct mail, for instance) to retain that personalized customer touchpoint.

Making video meetings and conferences exciting is one way of improving remote sales processes, but constant Skypes and Google meets can also get monotonous.

As we see new trends change and redefine the customer-tech provider relationship, it will also be interesting to stay on top of the biggest sales learnings that will shape the future of sales and salestech.

We’ve Got Some Exciting Conversations for you On The SalesStar Podcast, Including a Special Guest Episode with Xactly and Salesforce. Hear More: