News

Maximising Sales in a Post-Covid World

Ingrid Maynard

By Ingrid Maynard

Pressure to Perform

Sales leaders are under pressure like never before.

Many organisations have high expectations of their sales teams in a post COVID environment. This is evidenced through stretch targets, the need to re-establish market share and revenue and find ways to sell to ways that are relevant to the new operating environment.The rules have changed but the sales and performance pressure hasn’t.

There is no precedent for how to navigate the pathway forward.Success lies in developing the mindset, strategies and tools that are fit for purpose and designed for accelerated impact.

How well will your sales leaders fare?
Research from McKinsey in October 2020 shows that B2B customers in the US have changed the way they want to engage with sales people.While this is Australia, the trend holds.There are more ways now to connect with, meet with, progress opportunity with and present solutions with customers now than ever before.

What’s changed?

Put simply, what worked pre 2020 isn’t enough now.These are the qualities sales leaders need if they’re going to lead your organisation’s recovery:

1. Navigate and lead teams through volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

There is no roadmap for this, but using David Rock’s SCARF model can help to show the direction to lead team members away from behaviours that aren’t effective and toward those that are by:

Facilitating status by building confidence and recognising output and results

Establish certainty by being consistent in approach, direction, and fostering an environment of trust

Fostering autonomy by supporting team members to work independently and interdependently with systems that are easy to use, foster collaboration and enable remote working

Build relatedness by utilising a variety of tech and in-person platforms to connect and communicate with teams formally and socially with varying frequencies.

Reinforce fairness by ensuring equal access to information, communication, accountability and encouraging all to take ownership over their actions and outcomes.

2. Having ingenuity to help their teams find new solutions to the perpetual sales challenges of filling the sales funnel with new prospecting techniques, new ways to connect and build trust across multiple formats, ensure the product/offer and the client engagement approaches are relevant, aligned and valuable to their customers now.

3. Grit, tenacity and resilience with a deeper internal level of resourcefulness to draw from.

Understanding it’s no longer about skill alone: it’s about mindset, practices, mental and emotional well-being, physical health, performance hacks and strong interpersonal skills.

4. Drive a commercial approach to client engagement by educating teams to understand the levers they can work with to drive better top line performance, improve margins, reduce cost to serve and improve efficiencies. Recovery isn’t just about more sales: it’s about better bottom lines.

So you can see there is much work to do.Executives must develop their sales leaders because this is the pivot point that will provide the best return on investment.

———————————————————————————-

Ingrid Maynard is the Director of The Sales Doctor, focused on sales improvement programs that build internal sales and service capacity and create lasting results for corporations, large and mid-sized enterprises. Every program is bespoke, to create purpose built systems, tools, templates and workshops and coaching programs to measure the shift in behaviour and outcomes

Find out more about The Sales Doctor at www.thesalesdr.com.au or call Ingrid on 0409 204 732.