‘Sales From Home’ In The Time of Social Distancing

It’s easier for certain roles than others. Non-customer facing teams in your company can smoothly transition to remote roles. Customer-facing teams, on the other hand, have had to do a lot of adapting. Especially, folks in sales.

During this time your field sales team can’t physically meet customers. After all, health comes first.

As a business owner or manager, you also want to think of ways where sales teams can make the most of this time.

There are external factors that will definitely impact your sales, but that doesn’t mean you settle for anything at all. There are distractions at home, some that can be avoided and some can’t.

For instance, your top-performing representative may be spending time trying to pacify his daughter or the rep who brought in the biggest numbers is juggling incoming sales calls while throwing instructions at the household help. You can’t blame them but neither can you risk your business.

Especially at a time when digital marketing has the potential to boom. Currently, a large chunk of the population is at home browsing sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. This is the time to up your marketing game. Also, all your resources can be allocated to handling incoming inquiries.

Now you must be thinking about how the distractions of working from home will mean fewer calls and few customer engagements. ‘This isn’t the time to invest in marketing’, is a general thought.

Not necessarily. While you can’t avoid or control the distractions remote teams face you can definitely ease the process of customer engagement.

Let’s say you begin to get 300 leads in a day. These 300 leads are then auto-allocated to 5 representatives based on the product/project your company specializes in. Now each of these representatives has 60 odd leads. Keeping in mind the distractions, the representative will be able to engage with 25 of these leads on time.

The rest will be forgotten behind the cries of a toddler or the buzz of the washing machine.

What Paramantra has done is to develop a solution that automatically allows your team to engage with leads within 5 minutes of an inquiry.

 Simple and quick.

The same MIT research has also found that immediate customer engagement can give you 21 times more meetings. It can also reduce lead wastage by 92%. Remember, the initial marketing investment you were apprehensive about? Well, that’s going to be worth it.

Now we have the initial calls out of the way. So everything is fine? Not really. So we went a step ahead and covered another aspect that’s often missed.

A promising first call with a customer is nothing without regular and consistent communication. So your team now has to manage new inquiries and a sea of scheduled follow-ups. The latter is usually missed or forgotten. This means that the prospect is still not ‘warm’ enough to remember your solution months later.

So if you don’t call at the scheduled time, then the deal is lost.

It’s been found that the menace of the forgotten follow-up cannot be combated by outlook calendars, alarms or even the old method of ‘jotting it down’. Your representatives have too many follow-ups to keep a track of. So we made that simple too.

Nothing is lost or forgotten.

These are simple solutions, but given the complexity of our times, less is more. Paramantra’s sales solution is designed so it can be operated from remote offices. Even if your team has no access to the internet, they can update or access the CRM. There are no restrictions on device, browser or network compatibility.

The term field sales will take on new meanings. The role will need to adapt to the immediate circumstances. So, make the transition a smooth one for your team with an agile CRM that adapts to the evolving needs of your business.