Episode #179: Managing A Sales Team In Covid-19 Lockdown

Farmers and hunters in your sales team represent a type of harmony in peacetime. But Covid-19 has us all on a war footing and that balance needs to be looked at. Isolation of sales staff at home allows farmers to hibernate. There is nothing happening and they just sit around in their pyjamas, going through the motions, waiting it out, expecting the clouds to pass and the sun to emerge. Of course, they expect to be paid their base salary, despite the tumultuous times.

Hunters come into their own, because they understand what it means to be proactive, to shake the tree and make things happen. We can’t just ignore them though, leaving them to their own devices and concentrate on the farmers. Everyone needs to be managed in their own way. This is the point – a lot more hands on management is needed, a lot more checking in and checking up, needs to be occupying the sales manager’s daily activities.

Time management, scheduling regular meetings, frequent reporting sessions become the higher priority items. If there is a big enough list of To Dos on everyone’s calendar for the day, then things will happen. The start of the week needs to set the strategy for the week. Who will be doing what, what will be the reporting frequency, how will Key Activity Indicators be tracked – all need to be clear and confirmed with everyone.

The daily cadence of contact between the sale’s manager and the team needs to be set. Some of these will be group on-line huddles at the start and the end of the day. Other contact will be one-on-one. This means the amount of manager communication time with the team goes through the roof. If you are a player-manager, that will complicate life quite a bit. Your own selling time is substantially diminished, because you need to be driving the team sales process more than in peacetime. That is one of the costs of doing business in lockdown and the adjustment needs to be factored in.

Clients are in lockdown too, so the playing field is level. If your rivals are not as well organised as you are, then there is a golden opportunity to steal a march on them. Even if buyers are not buying, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be engaged in sales conversations. Often buyers are operating from a scarcity mind set that blinds them to opportunity.

Their needs have changed and they may not be aware of that. You may have multiple solutions, some of which can be activated right now for the client, but they didn’t know that about you. We often get into very linear conversations with our clients. We can have trouble getting them to look at the full range of what we can do for them. They have put us into a very narrow box of possibilities. This might be the chance for the sales manager to direct the team to rectify that mighty wrong.

When leading farmers, this is the time to make sure they are getting in touch with existing clients and finding out if there are things from your line-up of solutions, which may be of assistance in this particular set of Covid-19 circumstances. They need daily client contact goals and these need to be checked up on at the end of each day.

For your hunters, this is the time to make sure they go hard to contact the non-clients. The chances are high that your competitors are sitting around at home in their pyjamas doing very little. The gate keepers may not be able to block your hunters making contact with decision makers, because the bosses are either at the office or at home and are undefended. This needs a strategy session with the hunters, to determine what the approach will be for each case and then getting busy executing that strategy. The sale’s manager needs to keep requiring daily reports on their progress – who has been contacted, how many could be spoken with, what was the reaction, etc. All of this is valuable data has to be fed into further refinement of the strategy.

There is a lot more micro managing needed in business war time and sale’s managers need to make that adjustment, if they want to see any selling being done. Nothing is easy or simple, but so what. Time to get busy leading.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e