In the midst of a pandemic, a prospect might not respond to a company’s tried-and-true sales pitch the same way they once would. COVID-19 has forced sales departments across Austin tech to strategize in order to continue bringing in revenue while businesses adapt to a socially-distant world.
At SMS-based marketing platform EZ Texting, sales had to adjust their value proposition, update customer profiles and talk tracks.
Meanwhile, legal tech company DISCO helped its clients upgrade their technological infrastructure with a sense of urgency, as legal teams worried about their ability to serve clients outside of the office. In both instances, the companies needed to apply compassion to their customer interactions.
“Successful sales organizations are about relationships and building a human connection,” Andrew Shimek, DISCO chief revenue officer, said. “And now with COVID-19, those connections are more important than ever. Demonstrating empathy and compassion comes first, with business discussions a distant second.”
After shifting EZ Texting’s value add to address new customer demands like the ability to alert their staff with important information, VP of Revenue Navin Jagannath said his team had to adjust some of the sales department’s operational tools. So the company built a dashboard that allowed for greater collaboration and transparency among all customer-facing teams.
How have you adapted your sales pitch in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak?
Our service has historically been used for promoting a business by sending out specials, reminding people of upcoming events and using other marketing tactics. With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, we found that driving consumers to a business wasn’t as needed since everybody was sheltering in place.
Over the past few weeks, our teams updated our value proposition, lead routing, content and collateral. Organizations like DHL and the University of Alberta found that by incorporating texting into their communication toolset, they were able to quickly notify their staff of important updates like COVID-19 implications, shift changes and ways to improve mental health.
Our teams updated our value proposition, lead routing, content and collateral.”
What’s one change you’ve made to your overall workflow since switching to remote work?
With the switch to remote work, we found that we needed to double down and communicate more. We added daily stand-ups, weekly team all-hands and weekly one-on-ones. Our biggest change has been how to best engage our high-performance team without a coffee machine, snacks or in-office leaderboard to congregate around.
To provide a more engaging and productive work environment, our daily and weekly meetings are focused on interaction: meeting our colleagues’ humans and furry loved ones, sharing bread recipes, participating in a virtual workout or having a digital social hour. We are also surveying our teams weekly and constantly refining our approach to incorporate their preferences.
What does cross-team collaboration look like for your team these days?
Dashboards. Building upon our already tight partnership with marketing, and with the addition of our new chief product officer, our cross-functional go-to-market team is now focused on our “voice of the customer” touchpoints and insights.
We no longer have the luxury of side-by-side collaboration, so we’ve had to be thoughtful about tracking customer interactions to help surface insights to all the customer-facing teams, not just sales and support. So we added improved use case, objections and pain point tracking to our CRM, and upgraded our support tickets tagging. All these aspects combine into a 360-degree “voice of the customer” view, which informs our updated talk tracks, content, collateral and product roadmap.
Shimek said his team helped provide guidance to DISCO’s clients as they rushed to digitize more of their infrastructure following COVID-19’s effect on in-office work. Shimek’s team optimized their internal operations for remote work as well, which involved implementing the cloud-based desktop-as-a-service platform, Amazon WorkSpaces.
How have you adapted your sales pitch in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak, and why?
The industry is historically conservative when it comes to technological innovation. But the COVID-19 situation has replaced that caution with an urgency to move solutions into the cloud to enable legal teams to practice law and serve their clients away from the office.
The legal industry is now aggressively working to ensure they are prepared for future crises. Our sales team is working closely with our customers and prospects to simplify that transition and maximize the value they receive from cloud-based solutions.
Our most sensitive work, which typically operates in secure facilities, was forced to go remote.”
What’s one change you’ve made to your overall workflow since switching to remote work?
Our most sensitive work, which typically operates in secure facilities, was forced to go remote. However, we wanted to provide additional security layers and levels of data protection to maintain the trust and confidence of our customers. So our teams started using Amazon WorkSpaces to not only add additional security, but also provide efficient computing power to ensure we maintain our performance.
What does cross-team collaboration look like for your team these days?
Our teams are regularly communicating over Slack and setting up virtual meetings to keep business running as close to normal as we can. Team leadership holds virtual office hours to replicate the quick discussions and fast problem-solving that doesn’t always require a 30-minute meeting to address. We share best practices and lessons learned from conversations with our current and future customers.
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