In my interview with prolific author Mark Donnolo, Managing Partner of Sales Globe, we discussed what changes organizations have made post crisis, and what sales performance improvements to prioritize for 2021 success. He had tremendous insight to share…
On which sellers are doing well and which are struggling through the changes we’ve seen due to the pandemic:
“The ones that are doing well not surprisingly are the ones that are learning to adapt. So, if you take this idea of “I used to be in field sales Now I’m working inside, and I’m working out of my house And I’m doing similar types of things”, those people are not as successful as the adapters. What the adapters are doing is they are understanding that ‘I have to get behind just building relationships.’ And we can talk about what that means in terms of the evolution of the sales role as well in the future. But they are thinking ‘how do I actually help my customers rather than sell to my customers’. So, we in our round tables talk about the four phases of COVID-19 for sales and the first one is really acclamation. And in acclamation, which happened back in March and April, with the successful companies, what successful sellers were doing was figuring out, ‘Well we can’t really sell anything, so the best thing I can do is help my customer. I can empathize, I can start to figure out what are they really need and how can I help them.’ And it had Tom, it had this really great humanizing effect, because we started to talk to people… started to talk to customers like people, vs. telling them what we can do. We started understanding what they were dealing with. So those people that are doing well are first of all understanding what customers are dealing with. They are thinking more about how to solve the problem as I said before because the thing is there’s no formula for what is going on right now. They are also adaptive to the industries. We’re tracking various industries, we work across industries What we know is if you look at something as simple as manufacturing, wholesale, retail, very different things are happening there.
I Think the best piece of advice I can give is the future of sales is uncertain. And so, it is critical that you become a data driven creative problem solver and the reason is because we don’t know What the answers are going to be. There is not a prescription for success. But if you have good problem-solving methods and good insight then you’re gonna be able to deal with Whatever situations come along whether you are sales leader and you need to do that for your company in terms of your strategy or you are a sales professional on the line and you need to do that with your customer. Having those problem-solving skills are essential.”
Check out the full interview here! https://open.spotify.com/episode/2jxPweIwPisF8a7OEeJtmW
#salesenablement #digitalselling #problemsolvers #evolvedselling
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