The Covid-19 coronavirus has swept through the world and has caused tremendous disruption in most organisations. In particular, organisations that are sales driven.

No matter what industry you are in and the size of your organisation, the Covid-19 coronavirus has in one way or the other affected the way your organisations functions.

Because of this pandemic, many companies are forced to make contingency plans to cope under these trying times. One of the best contingencies that many companies have applied is to force their staff to work remotely from home. For some companies, this has at least managed to keep production going. However, there are companies that cannot successfully function this way as they need their teams to be in the field in order to stay profitable.

Keeping your sales team safe

Without a doubt the first and most important objective is to keep your sales team safe. Keeping them safe means forcing them to work from home. However, the question remains, how do they remain productive without going out and doing client visits? Pipedrive speaks about how to keep your sales team safe during the covid-19 lockdown.

Go digital

Fortunately, in our era, technology has perfectly evolved to make it not only possible, but easier to have a constructive and professional conversation with anyone in the world. We no longer need to see people face-to-face in order to talk and see them. Salespeople can use digital tools like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google hangouts and so forth to keep in touch with their clients.

It is a well-known fact that customers prefer to meet with salespeople face-to-face for various reasons when conducting business, however, in these current situations, they do understand and are able to conduct business via calls or any digital platform. This means that your sales team can still be productive and achieve their targets. Melanie Collins from Impact helps to make us understand how salespeople can still be productive while working from home. 

Help clients succeed

As a sales consultant, you are in the business of making a difference in your clients’ business. Regardless of any situation, your aim is to make sure that your clients are happy. Coming up with out of the box thinking to make sure you achieve that goal will make your clients trust you and it will inevitably strengthen your business relationship.

Inasmuch as the bottom line is to meet your targets, this is the best time to portray a different attitude. This is the time to show your clients that you really care about their business and the relationship your have established. In hard times, clients are on the lookout to see how they will be treated. Therefore, take this as an opportunity to show them that you have their best interests at heart. This will prove fruitful in good times after the dust has settled and this pandemic has disappeared. Randy Illig makes an observation that clients can sense when sales consultant only think about themselves in hard times and when they see this, they back away.

Having first hand experience with this, Eqstra’s General Manager that heads out the sales team, Heather De Vos had this to say, “One of the most valuable things an organisation can do before a crisis strikes is to have a designated crisis team in place. Eqstra has just that. Our highly skilled crisis team managed the process to mobilise staff to work remotely, quickly and effectively. We went from having an office base, to working from home using tools like Microsoft TEAMs.

As the sales team, we understand that it is crucial not to allow a vacuum to be created during this time. We have accelerated our efforts by creating specific marketing material and using social platforms to further our sales initiatives. We have used this time to do research on the businesses that we intend to approach, post  the lockdown. We have the time now to update our sales proposals, think of new ways to sell, consider new income streams, and spend time talking about new ideas.

Daily check in's with the team are vital. Video chats, virtual coffees sessions, WhatsApp messages, TEAM meetings have become vital in our daily routine.

I have a "change fit" team who have embraced the new ways of working.”