During the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed how companies do business across various industries. Although it’s true that 2020 was a challenging time for most, many companies have started to regroup and develop strong sales strategies to come back stronger than ever.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those business owners looking to boost your sales by developing fresh and robust strategies in our post-pandemic world. These tips will help you to counter the consequences of COVID-19 to supercharge your sales.
1. Leverage the power of digitalization
In this day and age, most digital companies have successfully integrated software solutions across departments. If you want to supercharge your sales strategies, consider investing in sales software.
These solutions are designed to help your sales representatives and marketing experts to do their job as effectively as possible. Since the term ‘sales software’ is vague and quite generic, let’s go through some examples of sales enablement technology that can successfully supercharge your strategies.
CRM (customer relationship management) systems are the cornerstone of any sales strategy in the digital era since they can help companies to track customer analysis and manage customer data. This allows them to gain a deeper understanding of their clients’ needs, preferences, and habits, and how best to sell to them.
RPA (robotic process automation) is another modern and forward-thinking approach to doing business. This leverages the cloud and modern computing power to carry out tedious and complex tasks like data mining and data analysis. This leaves your sales agents free to focus on what they’re best at: selling!
2. Try new and exciting marketing ideas
Depending on how your approach it, the COVID-19 pandemic could provide a perfect opportunity to rebrand your company. If you’ve experienced adversity during 2020, it may be time to consider repackaging and/or shifting your focus.
During 2021, many brands have launched different marketing strategies, employing creative approaches like gamification, neuromarketing, and influencer marketing.
Additionally, you can explore different types of products across different industries. During the health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, many goods that were never regarded as essential before became a top priority for consumers.
If you want to turn the challenges that come with the pandemic into a business opportunity, consider partnering with other brands to launch new products like hand sanitizer or to sell branded face masks that highlight your business and act as free publicity.
3. Run exclusive deals and offers
As a business owner in 2021, it’s important to understand that the pandemic hasn’t only affected how companies manage their budgets. Leads and customers have been forced to rethink priorities as well, changing their preferences and adapting their spending to our post-COVID-19 world.
Thus, the best way to boost your sales during the pandemic is by making sure your potential clients have the purchasing power to invest in your products or services. Many brands have started to offer special “pandemic deals” in response to attract customers during the coronavirus recession.
4. Successfully integrate remote working
The sudden and forced shift toward remote working, caused by the social distancing measures put in place to face the COVID-19 health crisis, caught many companies by surprise.
Although we all understand why business owners weren’t ready to implement telecommuting in early 2020, companies have now started to look at working from home as the future of the office space.
If you want to jump on the remote working bandwagon, invest in video conferencing and collaboration apps specially designed to help sales teams in a post-pandemic world. These software solutions include things like secure life sharing, screen sharing, instant messaging, and shared calendars.
Although you may have already started to use basic tools like Outlook, these are not designed for professional teams. The obvious next step for an inexperienced company is using email clients and personalized inboxes that can declutter your messages.
Luckily, a quick look online will provide you with a long list of options. These apps have multiple upsides when compared with other systems but, put simply, here is what you would gain from investing in alternatives to Outlook: declutter your inbox + get replies faster.
5. Redirect your customers
Thanks to digitalization and eCommerce services, many companies were able to carry on doing business during the lockdown implemented to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, now physical stores and companies are starting to reopen, it’s important to attract customers back to shops.
The best way to reroute your clientele and boost sales where you need to is by implementing an online-to-offline commerce strategy. As you may have worked out, an O2O strategy is designed to bring online shoppers to physical stores.
This can help you bring life back to your shops and cover the costs associated with maintaining physical stores, retailers, and face-to-face workers.
6. Prioritize customer retention
Sometimes, brands confuse supercharging sales with lead conversion and generating new customers. Although adding new customers to your client base will indeed give sales a boost, the importance of customer retention should not be overlooked or neglected.
If you want to avoid churn rates during the COVID-19 recession, prioritize customer service to keep clients satisfied. If you wish to have a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and complaints, check your customer service metrics call center stats. These will help you track call abandonment rates, call resolutions, and the average speed of answer.
If your customer service department metrics are not as good as you wish, don’t despair; you can always use a call center quality assurance form to combat dissatisfaction rates and other negative metrics that lead to churn.
Implement our six top tips today to supercharge your sales strategy in the time of COVID-19.
