When the reality of the global Covid-19 pandemic started setting in from earlier in 2020, sales and marketing teams had to prioritize ways to ensure any processes connected to pipeline or closing deals weren’t affected while being sensitive to the health crisis at hand when running campaigns.
As the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic started being felt on global businesses, several reports highlighted how call and email open rates were at an all-time low when compared to the same timeline in previous years.
At a time when customers, prospects, sales and marketing teams across the hierarchy are all (mostly!) working remote, driving deeper business impact with falling email and call rates requires new tactics and approaches.
In a rapidly changing business climate, the right business intelligence tools and insights are key to enabling better processes at this point. Today’s sales and marketing teams have no dearth of access to sales technologies and marketing technologies that can support better data-driven decisions.
This allows them to constantly test new approaches and strategies to ensure they focus on scaling efforts on only those that show qualitative results.
As most companies in tech lean towards an extended remote work culture, in many cases into early or late 2021, staying agile with the right technologies is critical to success. Here are a few key factors to keep in mind!
Identify your Baseline Metrics
Every company went through their own set of challenges when adapting to an evolving work culture in the midst of Covid-19, the one thing most leaders have been vocal about is the unpreparedness of most businesses to pivot their plans in time.
As sales and marketing teams adjusted to a virtual networking, meeting and selling space, reinforcing a stronger multi-channel digital messaging strategy became a priority. But when every company is moving to create better and more connected digital experiences for customers and prospects, evaluating the success of each outcome using the right baseline metrics that matter to your own respective plans and short term goals becomes important. For instance, based on a plan or strategy, would it be better to evaluate the no-show rates for a defined period of time or would it better to measure the reply rates to a particular email campaign?
Read More: Is Dynamic Content The Key for Better Email Engagement?
In a Dynamic Business Environment, Sales Forecasts have to be Dynamic!
A lot of business decisions are going to be influenced by the changing business and economical climate, the uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 means that sales and marketing leaders have to realize that what worked a few weeks ago might not work a month down the line. The messaging, thought, channels being used and process may need to constantly evolve based on the baseline metrics of each campaign, to meet changing customer behaviors. With the right CRM, understanding every deal in the pipeline and breaking down the prospect’s behavior to adjust next campaigns based on actual intelligence is a crucial step.
But at the same time, sales forecasts need to change to meet real time challenges and expectations. While sales and marketing leaders keep a constant loop between evolving strategies and forecasts, sales reps and marketing executives and the rest of the team have to be able to adapt to these rapidly evolving plans to be able to perform as per new processes.
Companies that can manage this well, while having clear insight into deals at every stage in the pipeline will be able to understand how to address their sales prospecting efforts better.
Conversation Intelligence Platforms to Help Support Deliberate Messaging
If there’s one common theme that resonates among most sales and marketing leaders, it’s that no prospecting or outreach should be stopped because there’s a pandemic. Building a business relationship because you never know what the outcome may turn into a few months or weeks down the line is more important, especially now. That means that most teams are scaling their outreach and plans requiring sales reps and executives to be more consistent with their prospecting. More cold calls, more emails, more LinkedIn InMails mean that sales leaders have to have a way to understand whether their remote sales reps are driving the right messaging in their conversations. The insights from a conversation intelligence platform can not only keep managers up to date, it can help leaders use inputs to constantly train and coach their teams.
Read More: Sales Content Solutions to Help Boost your Selling Strategy
The current business climate has proved that the future of sales and marketing is going to be very different and the only thing companies can do is adapt fast. Teams that thrive are those that have the right structure, processes and technologies in place to help them.
Ensure Consistent Growth and Revenue in your Sales and Marketing catch these tips from industry leaders, featuring experts from PopIn, Zilliant, Partnerize!
