Driving Demand Digitally in Days of Social Distancing

In-person sales meetings are no longer a viable option for the foreseeable future.

• Stay informed. Keep up-to-date with key news events and trigger events surrounding your key accounts. Tailor your value proposition within context of the current environment. Knowledge is power – it will make you stand out.
• Build rapport. Use this as an opportunity to build a personal connection with your prospects – be genuine, empathetic, and a valuable resource. People buy from people they like.
• Use social selling. Working remotely involves more breaks, both voluntary and involuntary. Social media will play a larger role as buyers spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn during more flexible working hours. Engage buyers where they are. Think digital!
• Re-diagnose the problem. Revisit your needs discovery and don’t assume what your customers (prospects) needed in January is still what they need now. You need to hit reset and revisit your conversations to uncover the new world they are in.

Selling has moved to virtual meetings, phone calls, direct mail, and email.

• Put it In Perspective. According to Spiceworks, 10% of paid media budgets are allocated to events. Let’s assume you spend £50,000 on an event sponsorship and typically get 100 warm leads. That’s £500 a lead. By shifting to webinars, you can lower your cost of lead acquisition with the ability to target accounts that match your Ideal Customer Profile (versus getting unqualified leads that swing by the booth for free giveaways). Let’s say you run 4 webinars in two months and get 100 registrations each. Assuming a 50% attendance rate you will get 200 total leads, of which 100 are probably warm. Your cost of lead acquisition has gone down significantly.
• Book dates on your calendar, now. Events are great to get leads in a short burst of time (1-3 days). With today’s new dynamic, you must build in pipeline-generating webinars over a longer course of time. Book dates on your calendar immediately and start promoting them to secure a steady stream of warm leads through the remainder of the year. Even if webinar and meeting dates need to keep pushing out, you’re keeping a dialogue open with potential leads.
• Use visual storytelling to stand out. Leveraging visual storytelling to get your point across, make an impact, and educate your audience is imperative. Draw inspiration from the Washington Post and Reuters about how visual storytelling helped educate their readers about COVID-19. What problems do you solve and how can you communicate that in a way beyond just text on PowerPoint?

The traditional 9-5 office schedule is out the window. Organizations are being asked to work from home and avoid coming into the office.

• Be on-point, timely, & persistent. It takes an average of 8 touches to get a meeting according to RAIN Group. We expect this number to increase to at least 12 touches given shifting priorities for many organizations. As a seller, you’ll need to understand how your buyers are impacted, empathize with them, and advise on how you can help them pivot their go-to-market activities. You may have more luck engaging buyers much earlier or later in the day. Refer to Figure 2 to see the typical engagement rates we see across Facebook and email.
• Arm Your Sales Development Reps. 88% of marketers agree a sales development representative (SDR) team is critical for ABM success. We anticipate this to play an even larger role, making it critical to consider tools like Outreach and SalesLoft to make SDR teams more effective and efficient in securing meetings.
• Remix your marketing mix. As a marketer, out-of-home (OOH) ad spending and events may need to be reallocated to digital channels due to social distancing. Leveraging social ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, and connected TV advertising on streaming platforms like Hulu and Roku can help target your message to the right buyers.
• Carefully analyze web visitors. As your customers work from home, they will be accessing web content through their Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus their corporate network. Reverse IP lookups may yield false positives – treat results with more caution and leverage solutions that can classify and screen out ISPs and provide cookie and API matching to help get to the true audience.

Your buyers are working from home, potentially surrounded by even more distractions (kids, dogs, social media, squirrels). Your buyers may be starting their days earlier and extending their working hours to later in the day.