With the devastating effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on many businesses, earning an income is one of today’s biggest challenges. How you manage your sales team and your sales function will determine how productive and how resilient your team will be.

These are a few tips to help you with increasing the resilience of your sales team or reps.

Tip 1. Decide on the top priorities

• You and your senior management must prioritise your sales activities and decide which are the most important ones.

• Decide what is required right now in the business to drive minimum sales performance in the next 1 to 6 months.

• As the senior executive team you must regularly review these priorities to ensure that you remain on target in terms of reaching the minimum sales target at the very least. In these challenging times, the review may be as often as weekly or as few as monthly. But do it you MUST.

Tip 2. Identify areas within your sales cycle that are most impacted

• Ask yourselves the question, "where in the sales process are clients not responding?"

• Review the causes and the reasons why with your sales team or salesperson. Identify the root causes, review the capacity of sales staff to deliver on that aspect of the sales cycle, retrain staff on carrying out demos, develop and improve your proposals, have refresher courses on closing sales deals.

• Practice role-playing with your sales reps to increase confidence and create call preparation scenarios.

Tip 3. Review your top sales deals which have been untouched for the past 30 to 90 days.

• Discuss with senior management and agree on the next critical actions to be taken.

• Practice situational leadership. After identifying the problem, analyse it, agree on solutions and then empower your sales team or sales reps to take action.

• Show your sales team or reps care during these COVID 19 times. Build trust within the team. Be thankful that they are pulling their weight, bringing in the leads and closing the deals. Work together towards advancing sales opportunities with your oversight!

Tip 4. Protect your Client Base. Client retention is critical to survival

• Proactively reach out to all clients with a view to renewing in the next 90–120 days

• Offer renewal incentives that deepen trust and value to solve the client’s real problems.

• Show gratitude by being flexible to client pressure points and their cost/risk factors.

Tip 5. Develop your best and worst-case scenarios

• Your demand and sales data from March and April is an indicator of the percentage of the slow down in the pace of sales.

• Pay attention to your largest source of variability:

  • Demand: How much demand is generated from new inbound and outbound flows;
  • Sales: How many top deals have a plan in place with the client?
  • Behaviours: How is the sales team behaving? What is their state of mind? How are they impacted by the pandemic? The sales team’s behaviour is a critical factor.

These tips are meant to help you think through your sales function in these challenging times… Remember to motivate and inspire your workforce and in particular your sales team by directly engaging in meetings when appropriate, making those tough calls that are required today, and picking up the phone and prospecting for your business too.

Now, more than ever before, trust and close relationships with our teams and clients surpass position/title. Nobody has experience or expertise in managing a sales team under these current circumstances.

While you attend to your business needs, please take care, #stay safe. Be grateful for your family, friends and colleagues #togetherwewillwin.

Culled from MaRS COVID 19 collection