In a post-COVID world, your sales team needs a new playbook. Here’s a good start to selling in the new normal.

Key Takeaways:

• Listening and empathy are crucial: Customers want to know that you understand their changing circumstances and that you stand with them.
• Get the entire sales team up to speed with remote work: In an era of work-from-home and social distancing, adapting to remote operations is key to success.
• Productivity need not suffer: Productivity doesn’t necessarily need to nosedive because of the new normal.
• Data and technology are indispensable: Technology and information will help you make sense of what is happening in your organization even as the business landscape and expectations shift.
• Tell the right customer stories: The right stories will help build trust and assure your customers that, in spite of everything that is happening, people out there are still winning.

Sales can be challenging in any situation, but things really went to an extreme when the pandemic and associated restrictions descended upon us.

With teams distributed, expectations blurred, and customers shunted into doubt and uncertainty, businesses have found that their regular playbooks are no longer good enough to fulfill business and customer expectations.

In this article, we outline 5 tips that your sales team can adopt in order to get a handle on the situation and get back in stride:

1. Listening and empathy are crucial

As far as your customers are concerned, everything has been thrown out of balance. The most important first step your sales team needs to work into their playbook is listening and understanding. Your sales team should be going into every customer interaction with an open mind, thinking: “What are their biggest worries? How can our services and offerings help them achieve that?”

2. Get the entire sales team up to speed with remote work

Gone are the days when customer dinners and an afternoon at the golf course were the only things that defined the sales process. In this age of remote work and social distancing, remote sales will make up the new normal.

Your sales team needs to get used to building credibility and making the sale without some of the traditional tools and processes they are used to.

3. Productivity need not suffer

In spite of changing circumstances, you may find your sales team becoming more productive once they settle into remote work. Sure, they may miss the interactions at the office, but remote work offers benefits such as:

• It makes it much easier to have subject matter experts and high-level personalities join meetings. It’s never been easier to “attend” a meeting.
• It is easier for sales reps to be transparent, make decisions quickly, and present their offerings as a solution to customer problems.
• It increases speed and efficiency on the part of the sales rep, which is something that customers really appreciate.

4. Tell the right customer stories

As customer circumstances change and uncertainty and upheaval settle in, the stories you tell need to reflect that reality in order to have the most impact.

Customer success stories from 2 years ago are not going to cut it when building bridges between 2021 prospects and your business today. They need to know how other customers have successfully adapted to the new normal with your help and how that could also become their story.

Call it selling through the customer lens if you like. Your sales team needs to be able to say: “Here’s another customer just like you, and here’s how they’ve been able to adapt to the present situation enough to return to killing it even better than before”

5. Data and technology are indispensable

Running a business was hard enough, but things got even harder when the pandemic hit and everything got turned upside down. Sales teams didn’t escape the carnage as they got resized and customer behavior changed.

Smart businesses have been getting a handle on this situation by leveraging tech and data to capture quick visuals of the present status of the business and where it’s headed.

Popular customer relationship management solutions like Salesforce can help your business take back control of the sales process during this pandemic and beyond.

A little bit of empathy, creativity, and technology will move your sales team farther along the path towards meeting established goals.

Salestable AI can help

As a sales enablement platform, Salestable AI brings together tens of thousands of hours of experience to bear when offering hands-on strategies for hiring, training, and maintaining sales teams. Our passion is helping founders and business owners break through to the next level of business performance by bringing in outstanding sales enablement tools as a software as a service platform to the organizations we work with. Contact Salestable AI today to learn more.