Today’s environment with COVID-19 brings rapid change, fear, and uncertainty. It is easy to become overwhelmed and sometimes paralyzed during times like these. At Sandler, we believe now more than ever that it’s time for us to focus on what we can control. We can control our actions and our thoughts. If you are in sales, you could be thinking things like:
• “Nobody is buying right now.”
• “I need to hunker down.”
• “My customers and prospects don’t want to hear from me.”
If these are some of the beliefs we have, then we will probably be decreasing our sales activities instead of increasing. Now is not the time to be idle, now is the time to increase our sales activities as much as 2-3x what they were a month ago. Our customers/prospects are more accessible than ever before. The moves we make today will differentiate us from our competition and ensure we thrive coming out of this and not just barely survive.
Here are the three most essential sales behaviors you or your sales team should be doing during this time:
1. Touch Calls- Reaching out to existing customers to see how they have been impacted, what new opportunities present themselves, and how can you continue to support and add value for them.
2. Tap Calls- Reaching out to old customers who you haven’t spoken to or contacts who never bought previously and “tapping” them to see how they are impacted and what has changed since you last talked to them.
3. Track Calls- Reaching out to people who are in your current pipeline. Finding out what is the impact on the opportunity you were working on. It is critical to clean your pipeline to know what is real.
Create a goal for yourself for how many of these three types of activities you want to do on a daily/weekly bases. Track how many attempts you made and how many conversations you had. You have 100% control over your activity. Today more than ever, we must focus on what we can control because there is so much that is out of our control.
