How To's

How to Take Care of Your B2B Team During Coronavirus

Xant Team

May 4, 2020

Taking care of your B2B sales team during coronavirus is paramount, but without having been in a situation like this, what’s the best course of action for leaders?

In this article:

Tips for Sales Leaders During Coronavirus

B2B sales thrive on events and face to face meetings to close deals. Since that has not been possible because of social distancing rules and shelter in place practices, there has been a significant impact on the way teams work.

This is a very topical subject right now, and salespeople around the world are figuring out what they can do, what they can’t do, what they can change, and what they can’t change. There are lots of theories as to what we should do right now.

Support Your B2B Team b2b sales coronavirus

Transitioning to remote practices has many benefits, and it’s an excellent opportunity to lead your teams in a positive direction and encroach positive characteristics on them.

Remind your teams that things will get better, and we will get through this by working as a community.

Some parts of the economy are still growing, and it’s a great opportunity to be more economically responsible and drive new revenue.

Encourage your team to talk to you about their concerns. The world is going through an unprecedented difficult time.

Understand what constraints your team has while working from home. What does their set up look like, what personal issue do they have, what are their stresses, and what physical barriers do they face?

Provide your team with the resources they need to do their jobs and appreciate where constraints lay.

Practical Tips to Help Take Care of Your B2B Team

Consider stopping your sequencer, pause sales engagement platforms, and rethink – do you have the right ‘verticals,’ is your customer base correct, rethink your target list. It’s a good time to pause and slow down in order to speed up later.

It would help if you were designing a cadence or a play that will help your teams engage with prospects and getting them into a dialogue phase so that they can ask for the Zoom later.

It seems the personal nature of calling is working well now, as opposed to emails, so this is a great time to encourage your teams to make some personal calls and be assertive. They can obtain phone numbers from LinkedIn and even ping their contacts to arrange a call. When they do connect, encourage them to make the connection meaningful in the first minutes.

You don’t need to grind to a halt or reduce speed too much – leverage technology and find a balance. Meet with your teams and dust off your tech stacks and start looking at incorporating humanized, personalized, and empathized methods. Ensure your team knows to personalize messages and make phone calls with added empathy.

Develop content that your teams can use to engage clients. This can take many formats, such as videos, blogs, graphic visuals, YouTube content, etc. This will encourage organic conversations with your clients and sales teams. If you can provide a free service for a temporary period, your team will be able to connect better and feel like they are supporting the industry.

KPIs b2b sales coronavirus

You may not need to change KPIs or performance reviews, just rethink them. For example, if you look at the statistics of conversation to meeting conversion year over year or reply rates, it’s an uphill battle for your team and your reps to be hitting the same marks as they were three to six weeks ago.

Instead, it’s a big win for your teams to be having warm dialogues with the right customers and to be planning for Q3 to ensure that quality conversations are happening with the right types of prospects.

If prospects are talking within LinkedIn, are responding to emails, or picking up the phone and chatting, any interactivity is like a new KPI that’s springing out of this situation. Whatever is happening, it isn’t very easy to measure, so there needs to be some leniency towards previous KPIs.

Be a Community

Be part of a community to survive the coronavirus crisis; share best practices, and support each other. b2b sales coronavirus XANT is offering Playbook software for free during the pandemic crisis to help people while they figure out how to work better remotely; head to XANT Cares. You can also head to our website to find out further advice on how to work from home better.

How are you taking care of your B2B teams? What positives will you take away from this situation? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

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