The global pandemic caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) had repercussions in the business environment unlike anything we have ever seen. Marketing and sales organizations have had to adjust to new ways of working and communicating with buyers with a previously unimagined degree of speed and agility.
Every seller is now learning to navigate this virtual selling environment. To achieve success, they must focus on the mission critical needs of their prospects, tighten their message, and find the right stakeholders to engage in this new environment.
As we look ahead to the next 3-6 months, organizations need to set up the organization to continuously collect insights and craft relevant messaging to engage customers and buyers. Below is session from our Virtual Summit where Dan Gottlieb our Sales Analyst, shares how companies are setting up “the newsroom,” turning insights into extreme value messaging and plays.
The COVID-19 disruption has created new strategic considerations for sales and marketing, resulting in the need to re-analyze target markets, re-allocate resources, offer extreme value, change tactics, and re-design organizations for the new environment.
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has created the most disruptive business environment of our lifetime. The speed in which the anticipated impact came to fruition was startling and sudden .
Over the course of four weeks (March 5 to April 2), pipelines increasingly worsened for sales and marketing organizations as buyers took less meetings.
As sellers across multiple markets face an increasingly commoditized and hyper-competitive buying environment, sales leaders help lead the organization through rigorous change in pursuit of one goal: help deliver extreme value to prospects throughout the buying process, and thus, exceed quarterly targets. The pursuit of extreme value spawns rigorous resource prioritization and a significant investment in a new kind of sales culture full of transparency, feedback, and coaching. Meanwhile, as fast-growing companies rapidly evolve, sales leaders find themselves evaluating tradeoffs between people, process, technology, tactics, and metrics.
TOPO is actively capturing the impacts of COVID-19 on generating pipeline and how fast moving organizations are offsetting the impact.
Based on over 400 respondents, The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Impact survey highlights a number of changes that have negatively impacted companies’ ability to create pipeline, including buyers working from home (cited by 55% of respondents) and budget freezes (23%). But what is most striking is how quickly factors impacting pipeline have changed from the first week the survey was launched (the week of March 1) until now (partial results for the week of March 15).
The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is impacting daily life, and marketing and sales leaders need to know how to rapidly adjust in this changing business landscape. In our survey of high-growth companies, 79% of respondents indicated that pipeline has moderately or significantly decreased due to the coronavirus.
We have been closely monitoring the evolving Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as we prepare for Summit. We’ve been looking forward to bringing you our fifth annual TOPO Summit, making this the biggest and best event to date. After careful consideration of the current situation, we’ve made the decision to postpone the event.
The moment when we hear something that makes us question what we felt to be true. That is a mind blowing experience!
Now imagine having that moment across two days in eight different sessions while overlooking the Embarcadero in San Francisco on April 23-24th.