Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the world has witnessed a serious transformation with respect to the workplaces. The lockdown situation all over the world has a significant impact on the sales trends of many businesses. The “work-from-home” trend, on one hand, has revamped the way businesses used to work. Whether it is a small business or an enterprise, the digital transformation to a remote working environment has been equally exciting and challenging for businesses.
One of the most common challenges to digital business entities is seamless sales management. The pandemic has revolutionized the digital space and its working dynamics. During the paradigm shift, major modifications in different modules have been recorded. This article covers the latest sales trends as a result of the immediate operational shift of businesses. The evolution of sales, consumer behavior, marketing trends will be discussed comprehensively.
COVID-19 Sales and Marketing Trends
The top CRM platforms such as Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and many others have experienced a significant change in the sales and marketing trends during the hard times of the COVID-19 crisis. The year 2020 has been quite challenging for business entities due to the sudden shift to “work from home” policy and lockdown situations all over the world. Amidst all the affecting factors, salespeople are the ones who suffered due to every day new challenges in getting leads and closing them.
CRM systems tend to be very useful for businesses when it comes to managing the entire workflow in a highly seamless way. Due to a sudden shift, the CRM system played a critical role in maintaining business dynamics in a centralized platform. Whether it is about the productivity of the employees, their performance evaluation, software development constraints, or any other concern.
Though, below are mentioned some prominent sales and marketing trends during 2020 COVID-19 times:
Mobile CRM
One of the significant changes during COVID-19 times is the use of mobile CRM in order to identify how salespeople employ mobile CRM to continue regular operations. For instance, mobile CRM role in sales and marketing trends is as follows:
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- Salespeople are now using digital communication means to conduct meetings and calls with clients instead of an in-person meet-up and check-ins. As described by Zoho, about 73% decline is recorded in the check-ins. The feature is crucial for on-sales reps which have reduced due to lockdown.
- To close deals, onsite meetings are conducted. Here, another factor is the consumer behavior that is changing with the passage of time. Even after the lockdown, consumers prefer to conduct online meetings instead of meeting physically even for consultation purposes. This is a challenge for businesses as they ended to rethink revamping the sales module.
- Zoho CRM also noted an increase in making notes by the salespeople. Productivity has increased during work from home. The salespeople have started adding more activities (up to 22%) and making more notes (up to 29%) during work from home.
- The number of calls has increased up to 55% as recorded by Zoho CRM. The salesperson communicates and collaborates with the clients through digital channels to make seamless plans and pitch ideas to customers highly tailored to their interests.
- The number of records added in Zoho CRM has reduced much. This means that businesses are focusing on retaining the customers and the customer acquisition rate has reduced.
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Read: Zoho CRM for Small Business – Challenges, Solution & Implementation Strategy
Deal Pipelines
As per the COVID data of HubSpot, the 3-month data demonstrates the uneven performance of sales closed amid COVID-19. The number of closed sales has even reduced to negative in January 2020 and reached 9% by the end of March 2020. The data thus matches that of Zoho CRM depicting the same i.e. businesses are focusing on retaining their old customers as customer onboarding rate has decreased.
Sales Calls and Emails
Sales calls and emails have significantly increased during the lockdown. Businesses are employing digital means of communication to keep it formal as well as seamless to mitigate the risk of any negative impact on the performance of an organization. This also plays a critical role in acquiring more clients by contacting them through digital channels.
Marketing Emails
The advent of email marketing has gained ground. Businesses have identified the significance of email marketing to get more leads. The digital channels are used in which email marketing is an important module that uses different templates that focus both on retaining the old customers and acquiring the new ones.
Website Traffic
As we know that the lockdown situation has increased the time people spend on their digital devices. Accordingly, a significant increase is determined in the website traffic. The sales and marketing trends get positively affected due to an increasing number of visitors spending huge time over the websites during the lockdown days.
Also Read: Amazing Ways HubSpot Streamlines your Sales Process
Conversations
Interactions through conversations have increased during the lockdown. The CRM systems recorded a significant increase in the conversations of salespeople with the clients. The customer support agents also interacted with customers through conversations in order to help them by addressing their crucial concerns on time.
Ad Spend
As businesses knew that the lockdown situation is not going to end soon. Among the marketing campaigns, a significant increase is recorded with respect to ad spending. The businesses are making strategies for marketing campaigns in which paid ads are the ones on top. The investments in ads were huge amid lockdown. This is due to the transformation of many businesses as well as the users to the digital space.
