Scared businessman hidden behind the chair submerged by the mail
As a B2B salesperson in 2020, your ability to quickly earn trust and demonstrate credibility has just become your biggest challenge. Before COVID-19, there was an entire phase of the sales cycle dedicated simply to developing “Trust & Rapport” – and that phase usually required multiple face-to-face meetings with clients, just to prove yourself trustworthy. Those days are over.
A big part of your future success in sales will now hinge on your ability to establish trust online. For those of us in sales, we must now make a concerted effort to create online proof points because “word-of-mouth” is now a digital-first format.
Before you can establish trust or credibility, you first have to get attention. In the pandemic era, this has become the single biggest challenge facing salespeople in every industry and company. In the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns, more and more desperate salespeople (working from home) began bombarding buyers (also working from home) with old-fashioned forms of outreach, and guess what? Buyers tuned out and started blocking these old-fashioned and impersonal outreach methods.
A recent HubSpot study showed a significant spike in outbound email beginning around March, and then showed a corresponding downturn in email response rates. This data suggests there is still a significant disconnect between where salespeople are focusing their time, and where buyer interest exists – proof we have to engage modern work from home buyers in a different way.
Source: Crunchbase
