From being quarantined in our homes to keeping six feet apart and avoiding handshakes, the way we interact with other humans has drastically changed. In the business environment, the normal behaviors and tactics that salespeople have relied on to drive their success are no longer available. We can no longer drop by to see a client, meet a prospect for lunch, or fly to another city for a face-to-face meeting. More and more selling is now being conducted over the phone and via email.

And this isn’t a short-term trend. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that “a new normal has developed for businesses of all sizes across nearly all industries, with changes likely to endure even after COVID-19 is a thing of the past.” We may have lost a few tools from our sales toolbox, but we’re going to replace them with new ones that we can use to build relationships and advance the sale.

As a group, salespeople typically aren’t shy about providing feedback and sharing their opinions. Oftentimes, you don’t even have to ask them. They’ll volunteer their unsolicited points of view about what works and what doesn’t work with your organization’s sales and marketing strategy. Sometimes, the best first step to take toward improving sales performance is to stop and listen to what your sales team has to say.

When the COVID-19 crisis hit, many businesses wrestled with the "three P's" of a business disruption or an economic downturn—panic, paralysis, and pessimism. It’s an understandable reaction when we’re blindsided by such an unexpected event.

Managing Partner, Jim Hopes of The Center For Sales Strategy tells us that these “three P’s” are your enemy, and your best strategy in business (and in life) is to minimize each of them. This is easier said than done, but one way to move beyond the “three P’s” is to instead focus on the “three A’s”—assess, adapt, and accelerate.

We’ve all heard the edict, “Ready, aim, fire.” Unfortunately, many marketers follow a different directive—“Fire, ready, aim.” They have it backwards. They jump into executing marketing tactics and campaigns before they understand their target, then they try to adjust and optimize after the fact.

A strong sales process helps the prospect along their journey but also acts as a roadmap to consistently close deals. Each action in the sales process should lead to greater connections and business growth. In order to gain revenue for your business, the key is to know how one element influences your entire sales process.

An unknown philosopher once said, “The pursuit of earning trust, not greed, will bring success.” Salespeople who focus on the opportunity, the deal, and the revenue when engaging a prospect often find success elusive. However, success often comes easier to the salesperson who focuses more on earning the trust of their prospect more than earning their next commission check. 

When the prospect trusts the salesperson, barriers are eliminated. Trust leads to open and transparent discussions about real business problems the prospect is experiencing and the impact those problems are having on the business. Only then can real solutions be explored. Effective selling starts with effective problem-solving, and effective problem-solving is built on a foundation of trust. Below are ways to build a solid foundation of trust.      

The primary purpose of marketing content is to drive traffic to your website and generating leads, but it’s not its only purpose. The content your marketing team creates as a part of the organization’s marketing strategy can and should be repurposed to support the entire sales process.

This includes resources like blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, Infographics, webinar recordings, and videos. Each of these resources can be used to reinforce your sales message, provide additional insight, and answer questions your prospects didn’t even know they had.

In short, they help remove friction as prospects move from the awareness stage, through the consideration stage, and into the decision stage. When marketing resources are appropriately mapped to the various stages of the buyer’s journey, the velocity of the sales process will increase, and sales cycles will shorten.

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Brands who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI, and 55% of brands say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority, according to Hubspot data.

However, having a blog on your website doesn't guarantee ROI. Too often we see businesses and brands start without a blog strategy. They're full of energy and they start producing numerous blog posts filled with fresh ideas. The first 45 days are exciting as the content is flowing but between day 45 and 60, page views start to taper, and even though the numbers look good, visitors aren’t turning into customers.

When you invest in a new effort like inbound marketing at your company, or you enter into a partnership with a marketing agency, everyone expects to get results. No one does marketing for marketing’s sake. We want to:

• Establish our brand
• Build an audience
• Convert leads
• Grow a pipeline
• Accelerate deals through the funnel
• And, ultimately, grow revenue

Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Instead of experiencing the euphoria that comes with achieving goals, you suffer the frustration of unfulfilled potential.   

According to a recent NAPEO market survey, almost one-third of PEOS who participated in the survey said they were experiencing a decline in operating income. Operating income is an accounting term that measures the profit associated with the business operations after deducting expenses like wages, depreciation, and the cost associated with acquiring new clients.

There are two sides to the equation of operating new income: revenue and expenses. There’s one business function that has an impact on both sides of the equation — and that’s marketing.

LeadG2 is an inbound marketing and sales enablement agency that does excellent work with organizations that are B2B focused and have complexed sales environments. What that means is they’re typically targeting executive-level decision-makers. It’s not a one-call close; it’s a sales process that might have a long sales cycle, a multi-step sales cycle that could last weeks or even months. It’s typically a higher ticket, more complex solution that’s being offered.

One of the markets that really describes this situation is PEO companies and human resource outsourcing firms. These organizations are trying to sell to business owners and trying to engage in complex discussions about how they can better manage their human resources, payroll, and benefits. This requires building trust, credibility – and it’s a long, complex sales cycle that often creates frustration. If this sounds familiar, it’s time to stop using tired and overused PEO marketing tactics.