Sales Covid

Encouraging our sales teams and CSMs to focus on value

Customer teams across the board are also facing the need to communicate value under changing
circumstances. At Crunchbase, and likely at other companies, our sales and customer-facing teams have
two immediate priorities:

1. Continuing to demonstrate value for current customers

2. Proving to potential customers that our product provides significant enough ROI to justify purchase
when money is tight

Communicating these value propositions effectively can make or break any company, and it’s certainly a
challenging time to do so. For sales prospecting, new opportunities may be scarce, but prioritizing these
key messages and ensuring they are pulled through in all communications will help sales and customer
teams stay on track in uncertain times.

Key takeaway: Communicate and demonstrate value to stay on track

Mendorong tim penjualan dan CSM kami untuk fokus pada nilai

Tim pelanggan di seluruh papan juga menghadapi kebutuhan untuk mengkomunikasikan nilai dalam
keadaan yang berubah. Di Crunchbase, dan kemungkinan di perusahaan lain, tim penjualan dan yang
menghadapi pelanggan kami memiliki dua prioritas langsung:

Terus menunjukkan nilai bagi pelanggan saat ini

Membuktikan kepada pelanggan potensial bahwa produk kami menyediakan ROI yang cukup signifikan
untuk membenarkan pembelian ketika uang terbatas

Mengkomunikasikan proposisi nilai ini secara efektif dapat membuat atau menghancurkan perusahaan
mana pun, dan ini tentu waktu yang sulit untuk melakukannya. Untuk pencarian calon pelanggan,
peluang baru mungkin langka, tetapi memprioritaskan pesan-pesan utama ini dan memastikan bahwa
pesan-pesan tersebut masuk dalam semua komunikasi akan membantu penjualan dan tim pelanggan
tetap berada di jalur dalam waktu yang tidak pasti.

Takeaway utama: Berkomunikasi dan menunjukkan nilai untuk tetap di jalur

Leading Sales Through the COVID-19 Crisis

RELATED EXPERTISE:

MARKETING & SALES, PRICING

Leading Sales Through the COVID-19 Crisis

APRIL 9, 2020

By Phillip Andersen , Stephan Lehrke , Basir Mustaghni , and Kelly Newton

As the coronavirus crisis creates unprecedented uncertainty, it’s critical that companies figure out how
to protect and increase revenues—not default to just containing or cutting costs. Indeed, the ability to
grow will separate the leaders from the pack when the global economy rebounds, as it eventually will.

Once sales leaders have stabilized the immediate situation, they must turn to what it will take to sustain
momentum despite social distancing around the globe and invest to rebound in the recovery.
Companies in every industry have the opportunity to come out of the crisis as winners. In fact, 14% of
companies were able to not only accelerate growth but also increase profitability during the past four
recessions, according to a recent BCG study.

But with offices and factories shut, leading to delivery cancellations and delays; employees and
customers forced to work from home; resources at a premium; and travel becoming nearly impossible,
companies have many challenges to tackle right away. Sales leaders, especially in B2B markets, will
determine if companies can turn this crisis into an opportunity. They must take four steps to lead sales,
and their companies, through these turbulent times (see the exhibit):

Respond by engaging immediately with, and stabilizing, sales

Reflect on the fluid situation

Reimagine sales to regain momentum

Rebound by pivoting sales so that their teams can win when the crisis ends

RESPOND BY ENGAGING WITH, AND STABILIZING, SALES

It’s critical to engage fast and often with the marketing, sales, pricing, and service teams, underlining the
pandemic-related uncertainty surrounding the business and stabilizing the teams, processes, and
pipeline. Actions demonstrate commitment, so leaders must respond to the immediate needs of the
sales organization beyond health and safety. That involves communicating constantly, supporting
employees—especially caregivers and at-risk employees—through the stresses and strains of the
situation, and finding ways to keep everyone focused on the job.

Setting up a virtual commercial war room to drive a deliberate and well-coordinated customer-focused
response is important. The cross-functional team that staffs this war room must work in an agile way
using virtual teaming tools, as several companies have shown us. It must be charged with creating a
dashboard that tracks sales, risks, supply chain issues, customer challenges, HR problems, and safety
concerns on a daily basis. The team must also develop short-term actions to stabilize sales and generate
liquidity and to address the burning issue of how to sell during the crisis.

Because of variations in the spread of COVID-19, make sure that the virtual war room has national and
regional representation. That will ensure quicker feedback as well as more effective decisions. For
instance, when Amazon was confronted by shortages of essential products in the US and Europe, a
company taskforce modified the products that the online retailer stores and ships. It has prioritized the
delivery of household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products for the foreseeable
future, accelerating only those deliveries.

Discussions regarding the level of service that companies can provide (also known as service-level
agreements) are inevitable, both inside the organization and with customers. Meeting commitments
may be tough under the current conditions, so it’s best to be honest and transparent with customers
about the situation and the steps your company is taking to maintain service levels.

Business leaders must adapt quickly. Getting teams to shift to working virtually will entail rolling out,
scaling, and testing key technologies, such as VPN access and broadband connectivity, as well as
essential applications such as videoconferencing. The longer the pandemic continues, the more likely it
is that the crisis will become an inflection point after which B2B sales teams will work virtually most of
the time. Planning today to invest in the technologies and people needed to make that shift will pay off
tomorrow.

REFLECT ON THE FLUID AND EMERGING SCENARIO

Despite the need for urgency, circumstances dictate that leaders be deliberate and think through the
challenges facing them before they react. They should consult their business continuity plans, which
help protect employees and assets, and ensure that they’re able to function, despite the constraints,
during such a crisis.

To identify the best course of action, sales leaders’ first step must be to gauge the company’s exposure
on both the demand and the supply fronts according to the pandemic’s impact on product markets and
regions and the organization’s readiness to cope with the crisis. As a BCG article in the Harvard Business
Review argues, there is no one number that can capture or predict COVID-19’s economic impact;
companies have to look at signals emanating from a wide variety of factors to figure out the way
forward.

Teams must analyze in depth the main customer challenges in each group and product segment to
identify the actions they can take. One way of doing this is to gather data from the field and other
indicators to create a scenario-based forecast that draws on a realistic view of demand and supply. For
instance, BCG’s COVID-19 Consumer Sentiment Snapshot draws from a survey conducted every two
weeks to analyze consumer perceptions, attitudes, and spending changes as they evolve.

Having developed a dynamic perspective about the situation, sales must deploy an agile but phased
approach to ensure quick and targeted responses. In markets where sales are tumbling, it’s important to
identify key customers that sales should focus on and develop a view about where the industry is
trending in order to provide insight to customers. If demand is remaining stable or rising, as in some
cases, sales must find innovative ways to handle the uptick quickly.

Either way, the first stage should consist of rapid planning to establish an action plan. To identify the
levers at their disposal, companies should conduct workshops with senior management and select
commercial managers. The goal should be to draw up maps of the levers available to sales, prioritized by
the company’s exposure to the crisis and the levers’ maturity. And the war room can coordinate the
actions that need to be taken.
Then, sales must conduct virtual agile-action sprints that will allow the speedy development of sales
strategies to mitigate the impact of the crisis and tackle short-term gaps in the sales process. Sales
leaders can fashion the sprints, which can be run in parallel to the process of rolling out other changes,
so that they are able to develop rapid responses in the areas of highest exposure. Together, the action
sprints will help develop a commercial roadmap and deliver the organization some much-needed quick
wins.

In some companies, salespeople may have to be kept motivated by altering performance management
systems and incentives to reflect the new context. Leaders could, for instance, announce an incentive
floor, below which commissions will not fall, calculated from each salesperson’s three-month rolling
average or the previous year’s performance.

REIMAGINE SALES TO REGAIN MOMENTUM

As the shock settles in, sales must be prepped for the first five most likely conversations with existing
customers. That entails developing a crisis battlecard, which would typically include salespeople’s
responses when customers ask (as they are likely to) about a new schedule of contact, existing deals and
service levels, negotiating new contracts, resuming and rerouting supplies, pricing changes, and even
emerging best practices in the industry. Don’t forget that sales can provide great insights, especially for
small and midsize businesses.

Sales leaders should use the crisis to develop, and hone, digital sales playbooks, which will guide teams
in engaging with customers virtually. A playbook should describe the best practices about working
remotely, in terms of new technologies and new processes, and setting expectations with customers.
Some playbooks, we’ve noticed, contain best practices about social selling and one-to-one marketing as
well.

Resources must be used in a targeted fashion to counter falloffs in demand. Sales must coordinate
engagement across digital channels to create powerful experiences. Using traditional B2B marketing
techniques such as events, conferences, trade shows, and summits will not be possible for the
foreseeable future. With customers working from home, they will spend more time online, so it may be
time to shift to a digital marketing model. Companies must transfer marketing budgets to online
channels, using the unique capabilities of digital marketing to target audiences. In fact, this may be an
opportunity to migrate live events to digital ones such as webinars, online discussions, and virtual
community building.
Strengthening or setting up a B2B demand center—a central or regional hub of shared marketing
services, infrastructure, and processes—that can use digital marketing techniques (such as paid search,
display ads, search engine optimization, and targeted email) to identify, nurture, and close leads is a
fitting response amid the current uncertainty.

Sales leaders must also break down the silos between marketing, sales, and service so that the three
functions can coordinate their engagement with customer accounts. That will ensure a more effective
response while conserving resources. One way of eliminating those boundaries is to use account-based
engagement principles, which will enable marketing to deploy digital channels and customized content
to personalize engagement, thereby amplifying the efforts of the sales and service teams. Sales must
prioritize accounts, identifying the key customers to focus on so that they can serve them more
effectively and build deeper relationships. Salespeople can use technology and data to target many
more account sizes and segments than was previously feasible.

REBOUND BY PIVOTING SALES TO WIN WHEN THE CRISIS ENDS

Companies have to plan for the future even while dealing with the crisis. It’s a good idea to prepare for
worst-case scenarios including the unintended consequences of the pandemic. Sales should develop the
most conservative short-term forecasts for demand as well as supply given the likely constraints such as
prolonged social isolation. That way, organizations won’t be caught entirely off-guard by the twists and
turns the crisis may take.

But what goes down must come up, so companies should also prepare for the rebound. Sales teams
should develop forecasts that show how much demand and supply could bounce back, and they should
diagnose how much time production and distribution teams will need to ramp up and eliminate
bottlenecks so that they are able to deliver to capacity once the crisis ends.

Acquiring new customers, particularly by employing the cost-effective and data-driven methods used
during the crisis, will be important. To do that, companies should drive the adoption of emerging new
sales models such as e-commerce and digital self-service today. Over the past decade, B2B buyers have
turned to the internet to search for options, evaluate vendors, and, sometimes, to buy. That has
resulted in an explosion of digital data, which is helping companies understand customers better and
tailor customer journeys. This may be a good time to reestablish the ground rules—such as ensuring
high data quality in the CRM system—that were neglected when times were good.
Simultaneously, there has been a migration to the inside sales model over the past decade. Armed with
data about the customer’s progress along the buying journey, an inside sales rep can talk to a potential
customer and close a sale faster and more cost-effectively than traditional call centers or face-to-face
reps can.

Moreover, retaining existing customers and upselling to them will become a priority during the upswing.
Sales must double down on existing customers to drive product adoption and land upselling and cross-
selling opportunities. Finally, upgrading the sales experience and the customer journey, particularly by
harnessing digital technologies, is important. Sales leaders must invest time and resources to drive
added value through training, upskilling, and process redesign, among other initiatives.

The current crisis poses an opportunity for sales to gear up in technological terms. Sellers and support
teams must have laptops, smartphones, and internet access and, more important, must know how to
use the features (such as webcams and QR readers) on their hardware in order to do their jobs. The time
may be ripe to set up a sales technology group that experiments with emerging technologies, conducts
pilots, and drives the adoption of advanced technologies that will allow remote work at scale by sales
teams, now and in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge in the short run, but it also offers the opportunity to
transform the sales organization. That will help companies come out of the crisis stronger.

Coronavirus: How to Manage a Sales Team through a Health Crisis

Manage sales business COVID-19

No matter the size of your organization, it’s likely you’ve been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s
forced many of us to change the way we work and adapt to a sudden shift in consumer behavior.
We’ve put together this series on managing your sales team during a crisis, with advice and strategies to
help you navigate uncertain times. You’ll find out:

What to do when a health crisis changes the way we work

How to keep your sales team safe, optimistic and productive

How to reassure customers and adjust your sales messaging

How to adjust and manage your sales organization

What to do when a health crisis changes the way we work

The COVID-19 outbreak showed us just how quickly life can change. One of the biggest impacts was
made on the way we work, as well as the level and type of support our employees, customers and peers
need from us.

Entire organizations have adopted remote working infrastructure at a rapid pace, ensuring those that
have the ability to work from home can do so. Many were successful, while others are still overcoming
teething pains.

So, what’s the best response to a crisis like this? How do we shift our behavior and routines with
minimal disruption?

In general, it’s great to have the tools and flexibility for remote working set up in your organization,
regardless of whether or not you will use them in your day-to-day. Having these infrastructures,
technologies and processes in place is vital, especially when a major life event or public crisis keeps you
or your team away from the office.

For example, sales teams must implement a stack that allows for both internal communication and
reliable video calls with prospects.

Processes also need reviewing. What policies will you put in place to allow people to do their best work?
For example, during the COVID-19 outbreak, many schools have been shut down. This means parents
must strike a balance between work and looking after their children.
To respond to this, many organizations have adopted flexible working hours. As long as team members
are available for two to three hours a day for communication, it doesn’t matter when they get their
work done.

Audit the activities you conduct on a daily basis and see how you can optimize them for optimal remote
working efficiency. Ask your team for their perspective, and allow them to contribute.

After all, these changes affect everyone in different ways. Take a dynamic approach and empower your
team to perform to the best of their abilities.

Keeping your sales team safe, optimistic and productive

For salespeople used to the hustle and bustle of a lively office, the sudden change to remote working
can be challenging. Not only do they need to find a new routine, but get a handle on new technologies
for communication and collaboration.

This new, enforced way of working applies to sales managers, too. Your processes and training
workflows must adapt; keeping salespeople motivated and engaged requires a different approach.

Making these changes doesn’t have to be daunting. As a sales leader, you have a responsibility to keep
your team safe, create effective remote working policies and communicate them clearly.

Advise your team to follow their government’s guidelines and to do their best to stay out of harm’s way.
You can help by ensuring they never need to break a recommended safety policy for work. This means
implementing a 100% work from home policy, with guidance on how to maximize productivity.

Luckily, getting your remote environment up and running is fast and simple.

Most importantly, expect pipeline volume to be volatile. Let your team know that this is OK and that you
have a plan to weather the storm and come out stronger on the other side.
Read our full guide on keeping your team safe during a health crisis here.

Reassuring customers and adjusting your sales messaging

Your customers will also feel the pain during times of crisis. Their priorities will shift, often overnight, as
they face new and unexpected challenges.

As you help your team adjust to a new reality, no matter how temporary it may be, you must also do the
same for your customers. The best philosophy to adopt? Serve first, then sell.

Yes, it’s important to continue closing deals. But there should also be a focus on helping customers and
prospects that are facing new uncertainties in their lives.

For example, it’s wise to pause your cold email initiatives as a crisis breaks out. Standard messaging may
seem tactless during this crisis. Instead, take this time to rework and re-frame your messaging to align
with your customer’s most urgent needs.

But don’t leave them “on pause” forever. As people adjust, use that time to craft more value-driven and
empathetic messaging. Once the workforce is more acclimated to this new reality, continue cold
outreach initiatives with helpful content that customers and prospects can immediately benefit from.

It’s critical you communicate your company directives to your team. Make them aware that a new
direction is necessary and outline a policy on what they should and shouldn’t be including in their
messaging. Get them involved in the process so they not only have a sense of ownership, but also a duty
to serve prospects.

Learn more about how to reassure customers and adjust your sales messaging in our guide here.

Managing your sales organization during a health crisis

While cutting costs seems inevitable, it’s important that you continue executing revenue-generating
activity.

We’ve identified three critical business-driven priorities for sales teams during this crisis:

Generate and communicate empathetic messaging to employees and your audience

Prevent pipeline decay

Identify new business opportunities

Depending on your industry, sales may drop. Adapting to sudden and temporary changes in consumer
behavior is an effective way to combat this. In the B2B world, your buyers will shift priorities to adapt
and you must do the same.

Listen to and serve your existing prospects. How are they being affected by this health crisis and how
can you help them beyond your sales processes? For example, if you usually share content with
prospects, start collating timely information that impacts their industry and roles as it’s published from
third party sources, and see if you can create or adapt your own.

New opportunities will also emerge. How can your product or solution serve your customers during this
time? What features could be used to tackle these new challenges?

Capitalizing on these opportunities requires a great deal of care and it can be tempting to jump toward
discounting in order to tackle these issues. Resist this temptation and focus on how to best serve your
customers instead.

Read our full guide on managing your sales organization through a health crisis here.
Sales Advice During COVID-19: What to Change About Selling

Karl Sakas

2 months ago

Worried about sales at your agency? Don’t stop selling… but change how you sell.

While everyone’s distracted and scared during the COVID-19 pandemic, should you stop selling at your
agency?

No, don’t stop selling—because an empty pipeline will eventually put you out of business.

But the way you sell needs to shift, because this isn’t “business at usual”—for a few months, and likely
longer.

Let’s explore how to change how you sell at your agency during the pandemic. This applies whether
you’re the one selling (as an agency owner) or if you have one or more team members doing sales for
you.

Before You Read the 18-Step Plan

This won’t be easy, but there’s hope ahead. Not everyone will succeed, but you can secure your
agency’s future with a good plan—executed well—with support from your full team.

You may have heard snippets from Winston Churchill’s “we shall never surrender” speech. On the eve of
an expected Nazi invasion in 1940, the British prime minister said:
“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on
the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall
never surrender.”

Less well-known is what he allegedly said after that, off-mic to a colleague during the cheering and
applause that followed:

“And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve
got!”

Agencies without strong cash reserves will find it hard to afford a long-term attitude on sales—your
situation isn’t impossible, but you have a hard road ahead. Let’s review the sales checklist.

Sales Priorities for Agencies: 18 Steps for Agencies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Here’s my 18-step pandemic sales checklist… followed by a deeper dive on each point.

Accept that this will be slow and hard.

Recognize that your client is the Hero, and you’re the Helper.

Commit to a long-term sales mindset.

Choose to practice compassion, empathy, and patience.

Understand (and secure) your immediate sales and marketing situation.

Adjust your annual sales targets, including the impact on your P&L.

Create lower-commitment “bite-size” sales offerings.

Outline an iterative plan to create high-value marketing content, for sales support.

Show the love to your current clients.

Reconnect with all active sales prospects, leading with your high-value content.

Create a re-engagement campaign, to reach past prospects.

Craft a high-value offer for any cold sales outreach.

Stay accountable, including your followup process.

Build and strengthen referral partnerships.

Enlist your team to help.

Seek bizdev advice from a range of sources.

Find ways to take breaks.

Recognize that you’ll likely survive this.

Now, let’s do that deeper-dive on each of the 18 points. Get your team involved in this article and your
process—you can’t do this alone.

Deeper Dive: Digging into the 18 Steps for Agencies & COVID-19 Sales

Success today requires a mix of mindset, strategy, tactics, accountability, and iteration. I believe the
strongest agency leaders will encourage their teams to act with empathy, take a long-term perspective,
and focus on serving their audience in everyone’s time of need.

1) Accept that this will be slow and hard.

No matter what you do, everyone’s distracted. Now more than ever, your agency’s marketing and sales
messages are low in the list of your prospects’ priorities. Your efforts may fail… but if you take no action,
failure is guaranteed.

2) Recognize that your client is the Hero, and you’re the Helper.

We’re all the hero of our own lives… but right now more than ever, your job is to make your clients the
Hero. As the Helper, your agency is there to help your clients reach their goals… and this helps you reach
your goals.

3) Commit to a long-term sales mindset.

Are you going to be helpful, long-term, and patient? Or are you going to be transactional, short-term,
and desperate?
My advice here (and in general) focuses on a long-term approach. You may be tempted to compromise
and take shortcuts—but is that in line with your values? As they say, values aren’t values until following
them costs you money.

4) Choose to practice compassion, empathy, and patience.

This is about clarifying your sales philosophy, and sharing with your team. Everyone’s distracted, and
some people are sick—or have relatives or colleagues who’ve died.

Ask and listen, before you tell. Now is not the time to send pushy or otherwise tone-deaf sales
messages.

Consider whether to temporarily adjust your sales team’s commission and bonus incentives, to avoid
putting pressure on your sales team that translates to pressure on prospects.

5) Understand (and secure) your immediate sales and marketing situation.

This applies to marketing, sales, and everyone involved. The goal is to avoid making an obvious mistake
about an in-progress initiative… or lack thereof.

Understand your current sales pipeline, including an inventory of active prospects (and the true status of
each, now that the pandemic’s happening). This may require some adjustments.

Inventory your marketing leads, to understand what future sales opportunities might look like.

Review what’s in your marketing queue, to see what’s applicable (and not applicable) to helping clients
today. Decide whether to increase your sales team’s base compensation (via a temporary draw or salary
increase).

Decide whether it’s time to terminate chronically low-performing salespeople. You couldn’t really afford
them before, but you definitely can’t afford them now.

6) Adjust your annual sales targets, including the impact on your P&L.

Other than those with strong cash positions (12+ months of expenses in reserves), I expect that most
agencies will not grow in 2020. If you’re focusing on a hard-hit industry (tourism, hospitality, events), I
expect a minimum of a 50% decrease in revenues. For other agencies, I expect a minimum 10-30%
decrease in revenues.

To help your reset, here’s my advice on setting revenue targets—including how to create an annual
revenue plan. Consider your budget and Profit & Loss (P&L) statement, too—this likely requires
identifying strategic cost-cutting tiers, to reflect the drop in revenues.

7) Create lower-commitment “bite-size” sales offerings.

These are things to generate revenue today, even if they’re smaller than your minimums in the past. The
key is that the price range needs to appropriately reflect the scope (for you to deliver) and the value (for
the client to receive). Ideally, you’ll cut the scope rather than cut your rates.

Why? Because a rate cut sets a dangerous precedent that lasts the entire length of the relationship. To
echo agency owner Charles Kirkland, offer a “painkiller” instead of a “vitamin”—that is, something
people urgently need rather than an optional or “nice-to-have” service.

This may include a shift toward “staple” services—like lead-gen, PPC advertising, or sales collateral
design—versus “nice to have” optional services that clients will defer during economic uncertainty.

You’ll need to “test” different options to see what resonates for your target market today. As a starting
point, consider one-off consulting calls, a Paid Discovery option, “Phase 1” project scopes, and shorter-
than-usual retainers (as long as you frame things as a special deal).

8) Outline an iterative plan to create high-value marketing content, for sales support.

This will be a layered, multi-phase process that you continually “enhance” over time. For example:

Start with a blog post with your advice on what to do during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal is to have
something to share. Then…

Run a virtual event that expands on your points, and that includes Q&A. You want to be sure you
understand your audience’s key questions and concerns, and you need to record it. Then…
Create a COVID-19 Resource Center, to consolidate the earlier content and future additions into a single
shareable URL. Finally…

Offer an ongoing series of advice—perhaps a mix of video and text content, depending on your
preferences and your audience’s needs—integrated into the Resource Center. Eventually…

Consider shifting the Resource Center into a more-evergreen content hub, once the crisis has passed.

The key is that you need something high-value as “currency” to share with prospects, so your sales
outreach and followups don’t lead with “pay us money.” Beyond sales support, this marketing helps you
attract inbound prospects.

If you haven’t built (or strengthened) your personal brand, now might be the time for you to step up—
because the world needs your thought leadership.

9) Show the love to your current clients.

Clients are more likely to spend money than entirely new people, so be sure you don’t ignore your
current clients. Every account you retain is an account you don’t have to [immediately] replace.

Rather than leading with an upsell ask, ask about where they’re struggling, and then listen actively. Look
for ways to use their current budge to help them solve problems.

10) Reconnect with all active sales prospects, leading with your high-value content.

This category includes pending prospects who’ve asked you to follow up in the future—for instance,
“Check back in a month” or “Check back in two quarters.”

They may not buy—now or ever—but they’ve at least claimed they want to hear from you in the future.
This gives you license to follow up a few times, until they respond or until you send Blair Enns’ “Closing
the Loop” email.

11) Create a re-engagement campaign, to reach past prospects.

This category includes prospects who said “no” and prospects that disappeared into The Abyss. They
aren’t likely to convert now, but it’s worth a try.
Why? Some of the “lost” prospects won’t be happy with their current agency—and some of the
prospects that ghosted you before will suddenly have urgent needs today.

12) Craft a high-value offer for any cold sales outreach.

I’m not a huge fan of cold sales outreach, but now may be the time for you to start if your inbound
pipeline isn’t strong enough. Remember Charles Kirkland’s point about the urgency of selling a
“painkiller” instead of a “vitamin.”

What would that offer look like for your agency… and how would you describe the value proposition to
someone who hasn’t heard of your agency before?

13) Stay accountable, including your followup process.

If you aren’t doing weekly “sales management” meetings, now is the time to start. They help you (or the
salespeople, if you have a broader team) stay on track.

If you’re doing sales as the owner and don’t have someone to hold you accountable, recruit a colleague.
The ideal match as “sales manager” may not be a sales expert, but they’re comfortable asking you hard
questions.

Consider whether to add new pipeline stages in your CRM, to acknowledge prospects’ distraction levels.
Your old sales process might need some updates during the pandemic.

14) Build and strengthen referral partnerships.

If you don’t have partnerships (formal or informal), it’s time to start. I regularly refer not-a-fit business
to other agency consultants, and vice versa. I intentionally don’t accept referral fees, but most agencies
do—it’s like a bonus 5% or 10% on work you’d otherwise decline altogether.

If you have partnerships but haven’t been in touch in a while… that’s not ideal, but now’s the time to
reconnect.
If you’re top-of-mind when a partner hears about an opportunity, that’s one less sales opportunity you
need to find via cold outreach. And to a point, more referral partners mean more opportunities.

15) Enlist your team to help.

You’ll need to find a balance on billable vs. non-billable work… but if client volume is down, use the time
to support self-marketing. For example:

Your strategists and other subject matter experts (SMEs) can support content marketing and other
initiatives.

Your project managers can help you stay on track.

Your operations team can provide additional support and structure in your sales efforts.

Ask for help—even self-starter employees can’t read your mind.

16) Seek bizdev advice from a range of sources.

Cast a wide net to find the sales and bizdev advice that works for you and your agency. With an eye
toward other advisors who specialize in agencies, consider following:

Bull & Beard (Robby Berthume)

David C. Baker

Kelly Campbell

Kristen Hill (my sales coach)

Max Traylor

Mod Agency Insiders (Mandy McEwen)

Newfangled

Peter Levitan

Philip Morgan
RSW/US (Lee McKnight)

Serve Don’t Sell (Liston Witherill)

Win Without Pitching (Blair Enns)

17) Find ways to take breaks.

If you don’t pause occasionally for self-care, you’ll burn out. You’ll need to find the right approach to
handling sales during the pandemic, but working 100 hours a week likely won’t help.

Why? Because you’ll see diminishing returns as you become exhausted… and you’ll make mistakes that
actively hurt your results.

18) Recognize that you’ll likely survive this.

If you get through this, you can handle almost anything. You—personally—will likely survive. And if your
agency doesn’t make it, you will likely manage the setback. It will be sad and difficult and expensive. But
you will likely emerge again, to pursue new opportunities. Good luck!

Taking the Next Steps

What’s next? Block in a few hours to start your plan, and get your team’s help making this happen. This
won’t be easy, but you need to start sooner than later.

Want my one-on-one advice on navigating what’s ahead? I have a range of agency-specific options to
support you—including DIY tools, custom personal advice as low as $750, and comprehensive programs
designed to help you navigate the toughest situations.

Question: What are you changing about sales during the COVID-19 pandemic?