Charlotte Rogers wrote an article in Marketing Week. She quoted Nina Bibby, the CMO at O2. “The post-lockdown phase will be defined by effectiveness and ensuring that every ¬£1 of investment counts to the greatest extent.” Great comment. She goes on to say “In the post-Covid world it’s going to be really important to understand and optimise what drives value in the short and long-term. We use modelling to optimise our media investment strategically and we use it for each quarter and each campaign.” So why would a CRM consultant find these comments from a top marketer of great interest? The answer lies in the use of modelling.
Flawed data
Modelling is there to help you understand your position and your best options. We’ve been providing CRM systems for a lot of years and many of the organisations we support use CRM for customer insight and sales forecasting. So in the same way that Nina Bibby wants to optimise her media investment, so most of our customers want to optimise their investment in sales time and marketing effort. But there’s a problem facing us at the moment. The rules have just changed. Not shifted slightly. They have changed to an unprecedented degree. I spoke with the National Sales Manager of a pharmaceutical company last month and he said that levels of sales interactions have plummeted and the data they have always used for analysis is now flawed. And you can’t make good decisions based on flawed data. So he is seeking a new method of insight into sales interactions in post-Covid selling, where 80% of sales interactions are likely to switch from face-to-face to video meetings for the foreseeable future.
I posted a blog last month about sales organisation resilience. This blog, the Charlotte Rogers article and Nina Bibby’s comments all seem to circle around the same point during this pandemic. They have focused my thoughts and resulted in an action list: Top Tips for post-Covid selling. And here they are:
Go Granular
- Stop thinking about sales interactions as discreet units of activity
- Start measuring what people actual do inside each sales interaction
- Are corporate pitches delivered?
- What sales literature used?
- Which items of marketing collateral are discussed?
- Are product details reviewed?
- Are price lists used?
- Does a service and delivery pitch come into play?
- Is customer success covered?
- Is customer satisfaction measured during the call?
- Now, compare this information to pipeline conversion metrics in CRM
- What do your top sales people do inside sales interactions?
- Is this blend the same for everyone in the sales team?
- Is this blend the same for each customer demographic?
- Where can interactions be improved?
- Can they be made less ‘pitchy’ and more conversational, more collaborative?
- What engages the customer most frequently?
- How can we do more of that with the right people?
- Improve and refine sales literature and marketing collateral
- Use all these measurements to improve your material
- Revamp under-used collateral
- Polish up frequently used material with more customer focus
- Create break-out points in pitch decks were collaboration can be triggered
- Pose questions and record answers on shared pages
- Share collaborative material with your customers
There’s no right and wrong answers when it comes to defining and refining your post-Covid selling tactics, but one thing is for sure: you need good data to make good decisions. And collecting good data might need some investment in time and procedures. It might mean new tools and new ways of working to fit the new rules.
If you would like to discuss post-Covid selling, please use our Get in Touch page or message me directly through LinkedIn.
To find out more about post-Covid selling, head over to our SalesMatik page. SalesMatik is a tool to support your sales team in a world where selling is changing.
Alan Joenn is a Collier Pickard Account Director.
