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.
At the end of every year, TOPO reviews the data we’ve gathered through client interactions and industry surveys to analyze trends and make predictions for the coming year. What sets TOPO apart is that we work with high-growth organizations, meaning the data we review is from businesses that are often far ahead of typical companies. We monitor the early adopters of many innovative technologies and processes, which gives us a unique perspective into what other organizations can expect to happen.
Sales technology changes constantly and rapidly, which is why TOPO analysts continually gather data, talk to companies, and study the entire sales landscape to pinpoint the latest market trends. Considering how much of their budgets sales organizations spend on technology, it is crucial to have guidance about the areas of tech that are most important and what other sales leaders—especially competitors—are doing about them.
The sales technology stack follows the strategy for how an organization goes to market. It is the collection of software tools that help sales teams develop, enable, implement, and manage sales programs that resonate with prospects and customers. A tech stack is built like a house, according to a plan, with every component designed to serve a specific purpose. The tools should interact with each other in ways that create maximum efficiency.