By Nilesh Dadpe, VP — Sales & Partnerships, India (@NileshDadpe)
All of us find ourselves in this never before, very tough to comprehend lockdown scenario. Some say it is going to get even tougher over the next few months before normalcy returns. Having said that, we are left with no option but to reinvent the wheel in line with the current times to suit the current business environment. A lot of leaders/businesses have done a lot of groundwork when it comes to going back to the drawing board and redefining business and sales strategies. Top of the mind recall of change in sales strategy would point out towards e-meetings, webinars, being more persuasive, more customer connects, more incentive to entice more spending, payment period extension, and some more regular stuff. Let me take the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into this changing sales scenario and more importantly link it to technology thus bringing out the importance of leveraging tech to ensure sales success and in the process creating lots of value for a customer, finally influencing the decision to purchase. Remember, we all need to get back to top revenues, high volumes, sustainable profit levels and all this will happen only if we can adopt a different sales approach as compared to the “new normal” approaches listed above.
Considering revenues and profitability remain very important, going beyond existing markets in such times would surely be one right sales strategy which would help gain more volumes from markets where there was no existence. Chart out green/orange / free zones and try to maximize revenues by leveraging business from these markets, applicable especially for those companies which otherwise would not have bothered to spread across too much, pursuing business from existing set markets. In the case of a relationship business, reaching out to the last mile in the relationship tree would certainly help spread and grow faster. This would help cover up for the already sagging sales volumes from existing markets. Moreover, the lockdown is not here to stay forever, so these uncharted markets and otherwise unspoken relationships would turn into profit centers of their own once we are done with the current tough times.
As a sales head myself, another important sales strategy that I could think of is about identifying the current business requirements which surely stand changed to suit the current market environment, marry your product with the market requirement and swiftly align your regional teams to focus on the new opportunity. So when we saw a downtrend in volumes for our core payments business, we identified Invoice Financing as one large opportunity given the need for businesses to conserve cash and focused our energies on this product thus creating a win-win situation and adding a lot of value to few large businesses. This again becomes an important channel to scale up volumes, help sustainability and profitability, now and in the future as well. Another close example is an international winery converting ops into sanitizer manufacturing to help sustain itself with the thought of positively contributing to a COVID troubled society at large.
While we all speak about hygiene, contactless, online-to-home, sterilized offerings, businesses must note that sales will continue to happen if they increase focus on product enhancement and continuous attempt to identify and build niche features around the existing product, all the while thinking how to make it a better proposition for the end customer. These small value adds are worth their weight in gold in these current times and help sell higher. And then it all boils down to the sales leader who can further train his team to market these enhanced products features thus inducing some breakthroughs, preponing some sales. All this and more possible when tech is leveraged and suddenly the sales pitch gets stronger. While automation remains key to selling in such lockdown times, adoption of tech such as computer vision and scanning, adoption of augmented reality would also help sell higher. Almost everyone who wants to shop for apparel but does not want to expose oneself to the brick and mortar outside would yearn for retailers/stores to set up an AR app thus aiding sales. A striking example would be an international food maker who launched AR tech for a few food items where the consumer was able to get detailed info about ingredients and nutritional value thus paving the way for higher sales.
I hope my thoughts above add some value and clearly articulate the need to adopt differential, unique, and well thought about sales strategies which would surely help do better in this current lockdown scenario. While we all dig deeper into our thought process trying to come up with something different to aid sales thus ensuring success for our businesses, I would advise you to stray clear of any shortcuts and let the passion and spark to offer the best value to your customer be the ultimate thought within which reigns supreme. Looking forward to normalcy faster than ever, but not before we have identified a few exciting opportunities to sell better, sell higher which we otherwise thought did not exist. Happy Selling!
