Sales Trend 5 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2021 looks into what business leaders need to stop, start, and keep doing to rebuild leadership for a better normal.
At a local level, throughout 2020, we’ve seen many businesses, their leaders, employees and customers go through tremendous personal and economic pain while others have prospered and gone from strength to strength.
Taking the lead in such an unprecedented time of chaos and uncertainty means that business owners, boards and C-suite leaders including sales leaders simply have no option but to continue to work through all their choices, making critical decisions about the viability of their businesses, grasping the impact of gaps and changes in supply chains, customer behaviour, public health, employee welfare, people’s loss of livelihoods, new markets and the new ways of working, including selling and buying, that are emerging.
While there has been much devastation, there are also many game changing opportunities emerging that business and sales leaders would do well to take advantage of, if they haven’t already.
What is emerging in 2021 are the following trends on leadership and, specifically, for sales leadership.
Stop:
Forcing people back to the office: Employers are at risk of losing good staff if they force them back into the office, despite them being more productive at home. If your policy isn’t flexible, your staff -especially to those employees who have figured out how to do a good job remotely with a good hybrid selling approach- will likely look to those companies who appreciate such versatile salespeople. Current job ads are already promoting flexible attitudes towards work locations as an additional incentive for applicants.
Micro-management and hierarchy: How much control do you feel you need over your sales team versus how much control do you actually need over your team? The best way to evaluate salespeople will be based on actual input activities and outputs, not who is in the office earliest. This is the time to establish KPIs that actually reflect what salespeople are meant to do, quality as much as quantity wise. This means a huge change, in particular for traditional and hierarchically structured companies, with regard to ‘employee management’. Companies that had not yet established a digital work and trust-based culture before the crisis are now threatened with falling further behind.
Start:
Digital Transformation and Acceleration: Smart CEOs and sales leaders use these changes to drive adoption of technology across their sales and service teams, hard – skilling up their sales teams to use technology to collaborate, remote and e-learning, remote selling, digital conferencing, CRM and sales pipeline, etc. According to a recent 2020 study of 200 world-of-work experts by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the TUM Campus Heilbronn and the “Münchner Kreis”[1], 92 percent of them are convinced that the crisis will accelerate the digital transformation in companies. They believe that digital services and customer communication channels as well as working models outside the office will continue to be increasingly used after the pandemic. Up to 85 percent of those surveyed expect mobile working and digital conferences to become the norm.
Flexible Hybrid Work Arrangements: It’s about enabling salespeople and client facing teams to use a range of options to sell, collaborate, and service. Work from home and office options mixed with allowing salespeople to be able to sell and work from anywhere (see Digitisation) is Better Normal. A lot of issues, risks and challenges are solved by creating a flexible hybrid approach that ensures people can find the right mix to work productively on their own. Whilst face-to-face collaboration, and even the casual chat across the office hall are important to productivity, the majority are finding that more work is done in the home office than in the office.
Transparency, Certainty and Remote Leadership: All of this requires a high level of transparency about any changes happening, clarity about the organisation’s purpose, direction and go-to-market strategies in play, and expectations of team members, all underpinned by consistent, calm, clear and regular communication with employees at all times. The shift towards remote leadership will also require reflection of our own leadership style and approach to leading our teams and managing our business on a day to day basis.
Continue:
Coaching: If your staff are not as productive working remotely you need to assess the reasons for that. Remote selling requires a different approach in many ways, compared to traditional face-to-face interactions, and even good salespeople can struggle with that. At the same time, some staff might lack the discipline required to work in their personal home environment and come up with excuses for their lack of productivity. Make sure to assess these situations person by person, avoid broad assumptions, and keep coaching to help your sales teams really find their selling groove in the Better Normal. It’s worth it.
Finding Growth Opportunities: If 2020 taught us anything it is that the best laid plans can vanish in the blink of eye. Smart CEOs and sales leaders have never had all their eggs in one basket and always make sure they are looking for market growth opportunities in and across supply chains, in existing and new markets, including micro segments, and working in collaboration with a range of partners. 2021 will see more of this than ever before.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
[1] https://www.muenchner-kreis.de/fileadmin/dokumente/_pdf/Zukunftsstudien/2020-07-23_MK_Sonderstudie_Corona_Begleittext_final.pdf
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