Spoiler alert! If you are expecting an article filled with assertions that this is a great time to sell – you will be disappointed. Equally, this is not a doom and gloom piece predicting the end of times. It is a personal reflection on the current situation and how business leaders can respond.
In the UK, the government has over the last couple of weeks evolved their health guidelines and a package of measures designed to help individuals, families and businesses through the COVID-19 global pandemic. The scale of the changes that they are making is unprecedented and go beyond even those made during the last 2 world wars. There is no Standard Operating Procedure you can pull from a shelf that has the answers we all need.
For companies like ours in the SMB space, the pace and volume of news makes calm and reasoned decision making increasingly difficult. Daily we are forced to make decisions on the future of our staff and our business. Worryingly, in some cases, we lack all the data we need to make the right decisions. We are making decisions based on imperfect data, which will impact the lives of our staff and clients.
A time for leaders, not managers
None of this is going to change in the short term, so now would be a good time for practical suggestions on things we can do to create some breathing and thinking space. It’s time to provide the leadership that each and every member of your team will be looking for in these unsettling times.
The government was quick to recognise that beyond the business disruption, there is a very real risk to people’s mental health. Initiatives such as the Every Mind Matters initiative from the NHS provide the best source of information on what individuals can do.
They suggest that those working from home “Create a Daily Routine.” Here is one area where leaders and managers can play a positive role. Helping with the creation of task lists for every member of your team is not only helping with their mental health, but it also helps with preparation for the eventual return to more normal times.
Creating a plan at the moment in such a rapidly changing environment may seem impossible, but we have taken the opportunity to do a bit of data spring cleaning.
Some may wonder at the value of cleaning data at this moment in time. Here is where I see the difference between leaders and managers. Leaders will recognise that even such boring and mundane tasks have a role in maintaining team morale. Military leaders know this, hence the volume of such tasks in the training of service personnel. Put another way, if your team are complaining about data cleaning – they are not obsessing about coronavirus. Even if a data clean-up only delivers and hour a day of peace to someone struggling with their emotions, then I think it is time well spent.
Time to Focus on Data
Like every other user of a CRM system, our data is far from perfect. Normally there just isn’t the time to do all the work needed. Now with the whole sales team working from home is a great time to focus on your client database and do the hard work of cleaning and preparing for better times. Simple tasks like identifying who within each account should be receiving marketing communications, or profiling companies and contacts.
Our experience is that this sort of cleaning work should be undertaken in blocks of one hour at a time. It is best done without interruption, so a great time to turn off email and social media and enjoy a focused quiet task. Even better data cleaning can have goals. For example, update the contacts at your top 10 accounts with “x” bits of data by “y” deadline. Setting these at a level that is achievable but challenging helps your team build a sense of achievement.
If you would like help with setting goals, or cleaning tips and tricks then speak to us, we are happy to help managers and CRM users create a plan.
As an aside, with some of the data being cleaned, we quickly found that we needed to speak to clients to confirm various points. Rather than interrupt the cleaning these became tasks scheduled for that part of the day when we hit the phones.
The bit of me that thinks like a marketing manager, sees a lot of what we are going to be doing as a massive A/B test. Sometimes the results will not be what we expect, but in the current situation, there is time and goodwill in abundance. So, it is up to business leaders to seize the opportunity and provide leadership to employees and customers alike. It is time to contribute to the mental health of everyone you interact with. In my next article, I hope to be able to report on some things we are doing to keep in touch with colleagues and clients.
Even if you see this as a badly disguised CRM data blog (and there are plenty of those on the Collier Pickard site) please comment and share your thoughts and feedback below and let’s pool our experience and work together to find a way through this.
