Filling the sales pipeline during and after the COVID-19 crisis

There's a lot of talk about how COVID-19 is impacting businesses and threatening the future of many companies - and rightly so.  Consumer demand has dropped due to social distancing, local and national quarantines, travel restrictions and the uncertainty on jobs around the world, triggering sharp stock market falls and impacting global production.  But there will be a time, in hopefully the not-so-distant future, that the world will be free of the Coronavirus (or at least in control of its spread), where the business world will need to re-engage its workforce and clients in order to return to some level of normality.

The problem is, nobody really knows when this will happen.

This presents many challenges for businesses, especially those that are B2B sales focused but for the purpose of this article, we'll focus on the impact on sales. B2B businesses have very different sales cycles compared to B2C or more consumer focused companies. Sales cycles are typically much longer and for some sectors the cycle can last as long as 6 - 12 months between first contact with a prospect and closing a deal. In fact, we've worked for companies who's typical sales cycle extends to two years!

For companies to survive through the financial impact of COVID-19 and flourish on the other side, it's important that they hit the proverbial ground running as soon as authorities given them the green light to resume business as normal. But that may not be easy.

For B2B companies to generate sales, there is a huge dependency on having a full sales funnel with prospects at every stage. Top of funnel leads are typically sourced by marketing activities and are generated at trade shows, conferences and exhibitions. Sales opportunities generated by these activities are then nurtured through the sales cycle over a period of time.

Without industry events, how will leads be generated?

Herein lies the problem. Since February, a vast number of international events including trade shows, exhibitions and conferences have been either cancelled or postponed. If as many are assuming, business returns back to normal by the summer, many companies will have gone almost 5 months of lost lead generation opportunities in comparison to their business calendar. The impact at the top of the sales funnel is clearly significant, but there are deeper challenges that require consideration as well.

It's likely that the effect of COVID-19 on businesses may also have strategic implications as well. This may impact purchasing decisions, which in turn may cause significant repercussions for businesses dependent on revenue generated from new product or service sales. In essence, if most B2B businesses were to examine their current middle and bottom funnel, how likely is it that the deals that currently exist would actually close into new business or close at the same price and terms as originally predicted? It's often said that time is the biggest killer of a deal and the reality is that the time (and revenue) expected to be lost by businesses in the first half of 2020 will certainly impact the deals in progress for many.

Based on the above, it's fair to say that the entire sales funnel for a company will be negatively impacted and it's vital that businesses realize this quickly so that they can take pre-emptive measures to soften the blow of this.  Clearly, for companies that haver longer sales cycles, it would make sense to start filling the top of the sales funnel earlier based on their understanding of the time it takes between generating a lead and closing a deal.  For example, if it typically takes 3 months for your sales team to close a deal, consider starting that process at least 3 months earlier.  If your business has a relatively shorter sales cycle, you can adjust accordingly.

What are the options for companies impacted?

Unfortunately, there's no simple answer to this and the solution will most likely be different for every company. We also need to look at this strategically to ensure that companies start to build a healthy funnel to help fast-track new sales opportunities through to closing and ensure that there are enough opportunities at the top of funnel stage from a business sustainability perspective.

Top of Funnel Lead Generation Strategies

It's important that every B2B company has a volume of interested prospects at the top of funnel stage. Typically, for many companies, these opportunities are created from trade shows, exhibitions and conferences. In the absence of these lead generating opportunities, the following should be considered:

• Webinars and Online Events
• There's been an influx of industry specific webinars already and if your company hasn't considered hosting one in an attempt to visually communicate to your target audiences, it's time you did. Staying front of mind to potential clients is important for every business and webinars provide an ideal opportunity to engage with prospects who are working from home or engaging in social distancing during the crisis.
• Hosting a webinar isn't difficult and there are multiple technology providers who can help facilitate this. It's important though that you have an up to date prospect database in place that you can invite to attend.  If you don't have a database of prospects - speak to us!  (Our professional database contains over 500 million global professionals).

• Podcasts
• Podcasts have been around a while but is seriously under-utilized by many brands who haven't quite figured out the perfect strategy to create this type of content. For podcasts to be effective, companies should create the type of content that would be useful to the audience it's intended for. Think about educational content or discussing industry issues, or perhaps even discussing how a business helped solve a particular problem for a client - and discussing this with the client on a podcast. Whichever way, remember that the podcast must add value to the listener.

• Content & Inbound Marketing
• I'm a huge believer in the power of inbound marketing and with good reason too. Much of Nexa's lead generation still comes from our highly sustainable content and inbound marketing strategy, where our content ranks incredibly well on Google (organically) and other search engines, which generates large volumes of traffic to our website without us having to invest in advertising media spend with the likes of Google or Facebook. This traffic is typically qualified and generates a good volume of sales leads. For example, since 1st January 2020, 375 leads have been generated for Nexa from Organic Traffic, with much of the traffic landing on our informative blog articles.
• It's never too late to start a content and inbound marketing campaign for your business. Experienced industry experts such as Marcus Sheridan, would even suggest that times of hardship, low sales and limited new business opportunities provide the perfect opportunity for sales and marketing teams to align and strategize in order to create content such as blog articles and videos that add value to the intended reader / viewer. To reiterate, the key is to add value to your audience - share your knowledge and your experience to help others and in return you'll build trust and loyalty in your brand

• Digital Campaigns
• If you have marketing budget available and would rather invest this in digital media campaigns rather than content, think about using platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook to generate top of funnel leads. These leads may not be the most qualified and will require additional work by your sales team to qualify but nonetheless, if your business requires a high number of top of funnel leads, digital media campaigns can certainly help.

Middle of Funnel Lead Generation Strategies

• Account Based Marketing
• If your business requires more qualified leads that are close to sales-ready, consider Account Based Marketing (ABM). The video below provides some more information on ABM but here's what you need to know:
• ABM is the most effective and efficient form of marketing available to B2B businesses today.
• ABM is highly cost effective and removes the need to launch widespread digital media campaigns that incur advertising wastage and unnecessary costs.
• ABM delivers sales-ready leads faster than most other forms of advertising.

• Search Campaigns
• We've mentioned search engine campaigns with Google above and when setup and implemented correctly, leads generated from Google campaigns can be more qualified and further down the sales funnel than other forms of digital media campaigns.  The key to this is creating intent-focused keywords that, when engaged with will lead to a highly qualified audience interacting with your business.

If you are in charge of your business' sales operations or tasked with generating sales leads for your sales team, it's absolutely vital that you take note of the content within this article.  The longer COVID-19 continues to disrupt businesses, the weaker your sales funnel is likely to be.  This in turn means that more work will be required to generate sales opportunities at different stages of your sales funnel.  If you rely on trade shows, there's a chance that postponed events will not be held this calendar year, which compounds the challenge.

We can help.  Not only with our lead generation services, but also with the creation of a detailed marketing and sales strategy that takes the challenges of COVID-19 into consideration, while creating a sustainable solution that allows your business to flourish post-crisis.