Introduction

Growing or expanding any business is tough in recent years. Especially in difficult times like the ongoing Covid pandemic, the global economy is severely impacted. Similarly, every industry undergoes various changes in the business they do. As they say change is the only thing which never changes business should be ready to face any situation no matter what.

Sales are the backbone of any organization which acts as a revenue driver. The key role of any sales person revolves around reaching customer & convincing them to purchase your products or service. Alternatively prospects or sales will first analyse the company before making any purchase decision. Not all prospects show interest and not all interested prospects get into the sales funnel. There are several challenges for sales to overcome. And especially during this pandemic time there are several factors which are hindrance from converting prospects to clients.

Amidst covid last year, we tend to shift many businesses going remote, changing office culture & depending more on Zoom calls. Now the same shift happening over marketing & sales strategies by implementing new marketing tools. Hence a sales person must be equipped with skills, technologies, tools & resources for successful completion of sales strategies. Due to global Pandemic, diminish in the sales pipeline affected many sales professionals in 2021. Finding new ways to fill the sales pipeline cited to be the most critical challenges. So here we will discuss about some common challenges faced by sales.

Virtual meetings are new normal. Yes, you read it right. Sales professionals are struggling to adapt the changing needs of business due to the global pandemic. This covid pandemic has made sales professionals to re-evaluate entire sales cycle starting from prospect identification.  And more importantly citing prospects through virtual meetings seems to be top most hurdles faced by sales professionals in 2021. The major issue observed by most of the sales professionals seems to be breaking clients through their digital channel. This leads to identifying potential prospects across the globe.

This paves sales professionals to find a new way access right prospect through right messaging.  Right messaging & answering them instantly helps to earn an appointment & take it further which is quite tough & challenging at this time.

One of the never ending challenging of any business is generating qualified leads in a virtual environment on a daily basis. A report from Ascend2 states top priority of any business is increasing the lead generation process by reducing cost. Building strong sales pipeline with without ideal prospect may increase the financial risk for sales.  Rethinking plans to carry out strategies in favour of virtual environment due to covid is additional stress for any sales personals.

Having strong insights about behaviour & trends of customer can help to determine the qualified leads for sales pipelines. Once you’ve identified qualified leads with strong potentials, make sure all your marketing efforts are aligned in developing engagement.

Steps to maintain efficient lead management system:

• Track all leads sources
• Segment leads based on organic search, referral traffic, paid ads & social listening
• Distribute leads within with the team to make sure no leads are wasted.
• Strategize hot leads & cold leads for quick conversion
• Treat top prospect as customer & establish customer centric sales strategies
• Segment your lead database by implementing active lead scoring system

80% of the bad leads in B2B go on to make purchases within next two years” – Sirius Decisions

Well established lead nurturing strategies enables business to build trust with their audience as they move the bottom of the sales funnel. Such leads must be carefully monitored to create & maintain relationship with business. And more importantly, they must be present on channels where your audience mostly engages.

Nurturing your leads must be more important than generating excessive lead flow as nurturing leads can play crucial role in the revenue generating process.

Efficient lead nurturing tactics can be achieved by below steps:

• Have a deep track of lead insights
• Resolve the communication gap between marketing & sales team in nurturing leads
• Segment leads based on MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) & SQL (Sales Qualified Leads)
• Use automated campaigns to implement call to actions
• Leverage social media to stay connected with high quality leads.

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road”-Stewart Brand

In recent years, Advancement in the technology transformed business & industries at a fast pace. From sales manager to sales representative everyone is capable of accessing a wide range of technology products, automation tools, data analytics tool & more. Technology always paves way to take forward business & sales in tough times.

Steps to make use of sales & technology tools:

• Sales tools help professionals to work smarter & not harder
• It can provide complete 360 degrees of customer or prospect data
• Automate mundane task
• Redefine sales strategies for monitoring & effective tracking of leads
• Embrace social media platforms in sales to stay connected with prospects

Differentiating yourself from your competitors depends on increasing sales & revenue growth.

First & foremost relationship is all about constantly building relationships with prospects. Differentiating your products & solution from the competitors would make a big difference in attracting clients. Provide remarkable experience for customers rather than making it as a normal sale pitch. Treat each touch point as a potential differentiator in building steady communication through their preferred mode of communication channel.

Business always sticks to traditional methods of communication. But now meeting, socializing & success parties are not available as covid pandemic changed the way we used to be earlier. During these tough times going extra mile will give you the option to explore a wide range of opportunities in the digital world. And exploring this option will be beneficial for anyone & new experience. Welcome to the digital world. Connecting with prospects through different medium such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn & more appreciated as B2B marketers can connect with high value contacts in an efficient manner without any hassle. Open up to new models & understand different customer segments from reliable sources.

Remember below points when you are researching about audience:

• Understand your niche industry & their trends
• Try to understand buyer persona in each niche based on business
• Analyze competitor’s documents & white paper in the target market
• Go for virtual meeting & provide 24*7 to understand key requirement of customers.
• Be prepared to accept customer feedback, criticism & rejection
• Try to stay top of continuous marketing changes
• Review financial health of potential buyers.

Customer relationship drives strong business growth as it is top priority to keep your customer engaged & satisfied. In challenging times, while the main focus of any business is to get more qualified leads rather than monitoring existing behaviours & opportunities. With advent of analytics software you can improve customer creditworthiness & capture growth opportunities with existing customers.

Transition over the virtual landscape created more trouble for sales professionals who are looking to connect with key decision makers of the organization. Getting dedicated time from management professionals in tough during working from home culture. Thus, it becomes most critical sales challenges for any business to do improve sales in covid pandemic.

Undoubtedly sales are critical or challenging field. With right strategy & guidance one can excel in sales targets.  Hence it continuously pushes sales professionals to evolve, grow & adapt to challenging environment. Get directly engaged with customers & keep yourself driven over changing times.  Hence, in upcoming months, as more of us get vaccinated we can experience a change in businesses re- evaluating business protocols. However, everything is completely depends on key management people & how they want to restructure.