Written by It’s been over a year since Covid first started disrupting our lives and businesses. But with the latest increase in freedoms – welcome back gyms and outdoor dining – it’s definitely time to be waking up your sales activities.
Review your target industries
Plenty of industries have been disrupted by Covid, and plenty more have found their groove during the pandemic. Have you re-evaluated your target audience at any point over the past year? If not, now is the time to do it. You might find that your audience now is different than it used to be.
Hospitality and catering businesses are starting to come back after another challenging lockdown. If your product or service can truly help them (save money, increase leads, increase revenue, make efficiencies…) then now is a good time to be reaching out.
Review your messaging
We’ve talked about this topic a lot, but it really is all about the messaging. After being battered by lockdowns, furloughs, staff sickness, and overall misery, businesses don’t want to hear how great you think you are. They need to think about themselves and their futures. So, your messaging needs to be all about them. How can you help them? What does it mean for them if they work with you? Forget the features, talk about the ‘afters’ (what they’ll experience after having worked with you).
If you introduced buzzwords to your messaging at the start of the pandemic, now is the time to ditch them (if you haven’t already done so). Think “unprecedented,” “now more than ever,” “in these challenging times,” and “new normal”. It’s time to steer away from the language of the early stages of the pandemic and move towards a more future-focused message.
Review your outreach methods
Just because things are opening up a little more doesn’t mean we’re back to ‘normal’. It’ll still be some time before trade shows or dropping in unannounced at someone’s office will be doable (that second one might never really come back). So all of the digital methods and telemarketing that you’ve been doing, well, you need to keep those up.
Honestly, if they’re delivering a return on investment, then it would make sense to keep them running long term, regardless of what else you’re doing and how open the country becomes. And if you haven’t been using these tools for increasing your outreach, it’s definitely not too late to give them a go – additional activities give you additional opportunities, after all.
Review your targets
Did you drop your sales targets during the pandemic, or did you plough on regardless and try to get there? Did you exceed them? Were you miles away from where you wanted to be?
The past year has treated different businesses completely differently, and we may not have been able to anticipate everything that came. So, it’s a good idea to look back at your sales targets, analyse your results, and make an estimate of where you want to be this year, this quarter, and this month.
Things won’t bounce back to pre-pandemic levels for a little while, but with each lockdown easing milestone, more opportunities will develop. No one can predict the future, but you can start estimating what you hope and expect to see. After all, now that we’ve been at this for over a year, it’s not unprecedented anymore – we have last year as a precedent.
Review your dormant pipeline
Did you have a bunch of deals in the pipeline that went cold because of Covid? There were businesses that put a freeze on spending. Now is the time to reconnect with them. Don’t go in with a sales pitch, or ask if they’re ready to buy yet. Be human. Ask how they’re doing, what things have been like, what’s changed for them.
You may find that some of those dormant deals could be revived. Others may be completely dead. Some might need adapting to changes in the lead’s business.
Why have we put this one last, when it seems like the perfect place to start? Well, you definitely need that messaging piece before you reach out. And choosing the right outreach methods will be pretty helpful, too.
If telemarketing seems like it might help you revitalise your pipeline and bring in new leads, and we’re pretty certain it will, give us a whistle.