Thoughts on reopening for business- and technology’s role for sellers

With talk of reopening business and getting economies going, it makes me think about the fact that it can be one size fits all. How will each organization prepare to face a new normal when you don’t even know what that will look like. We’ve never experienced this before so what, if anything, can we learn from history. This isn’t the first pandemic. There was the Spanish flu and other plagues before it. We know that the disease spread through the trade routes and we know that different geographic areas were affected differently. We know that blame was placed irrationally on races and countries.
So we must work and act differently. We must make sure that the trade routes (people and logistic product movement) are safe.  We must continue to support a global economy and help each other. We must operate with new safety. This will give new start ups a chance to create products and services to help do just that. Organizations who didn’t have a remote work backup plan will now have trialed and tested theirs and can make improvements.

As businesses get the all clear to go back to work and the wheels begin to churn, so will the pipeline begin to open up and deals will begin to move more freely through your pipeline.  But the composition of deals will change.  Some things will be moved to a digital channel, some will need to be a lengthy process involving human touch points and likely you’ll see a hybrid approach.

How will you enable sellers to sell differently?  In a previous blog, I wrote about the need to rely on sales training to change the way sellers work deals.  The reliance on technology to help sellers will likely increase if and until buyers are comfortable with face to face visits on complex B2B deals.  With the reliance will likely also come the idea of adding more technology.  I’d encourage organizations to rationalize their tech stacks.  Make sure that you’re getting value from the applications you have already purchased.  If you aren’t, review the implementation.  Did you create an implementation and support system to drive behavior?  If you did and you aren’t receiving value, re-examine the need for that technology in favor of something that will help you achieve your goals.

Think about how sales will need to work virtually and differently as your prospects and customers won’t work the same way as before.  You’ll need to teach sellers how to work in this new digital way most effectively.  And, if your organization is like many, you have somewhere between 10-16 (maybe more) technologies that sellers need to use to do their jobs in place and now possibly more.  How will you help them sift through all of those technologies.  One way is to consider digital adoption solutions.

To Do List:

1.  Examine and rationalize your tech stack.  Make sure the technology is going to provide ROI.
2. Consider the use of digital adoption solutions (DAS) to help sellers move quickly through tasks that are complex, infrequent, or where you are changing processes.
3. Even better, use DAS to help with driving changes to behavior. Help sellers to work differently.

In the end, sellers will be more efficient, data entry can be more accurate, and sellers will continue to engage and have more time to focus on the art of selling.