Many things are in short supply today. Jobs. Venture Funding. Test kits. Internet bandwidth. Ventilators. One thing that is definitely not in short supply is advice (only if someone gave me a face mask for every 'Guide to remote work' out there!).

Despite (or perhaps in spite of) the plentiful advice, these are confusing times. From 1000s of threads across forums like LinkedIn, Modern Sales Pros, several SaaS Founder groups, etc. it is clear that a lot of the internal dialogue in sales has been focused on survival. An unfortunate casualty of the noise from this internal chatter has been the buyer's perspective. e.g. a common advice for Sales & Marketing teams is "Focus on content". Are your readers ready to read about your cool tool or are they too busy making sense of the latest stats on COVID-19 instead?

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Why this ebook?

To help make a better sense of the changes happening around us, we reached out to many sales and business leaders to understand both the seller and buyer perspectives primarily in the context of B2B interactions. We initially started this as a way for us to get inputs into redesigning our own business plan for the next 6 months. We quickly realized that this was some of the best and most actionable advice we had seen - partially because of the breadth and partially the 'rawness' of it. A lot of our customers - who are B2B sales leaders - were keen for us to share our findings with them and that inspired us to compile this into an eBook. 

We have tried to present as many different and sometimes contradictory points of view as possible. To help make sense of these contradictions, we have presented our recommendations based on our understanding of the specific context of the people we spoke to e.g. based on their team size, target industry, product space etc. 

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One of the discussions where we have had polar opposite opinions was on whether it should be relationship or value focussed 'selling' right now. 

Those who spoke in support of value talked about how now more than ever, people want to see RoI & value when investing in a solution. This is the time 'must-have' tools will shine and to show why your tool is must-have is important. While this is a proper argument for those who speak for the focus on relationship building said that no one is going to make a purchase decision right now. This is a tough time to initiate a new conversation and the sales cycle will be long so building a relationship is necessary.

In this eBook, we have tried to answer questions like...

• What are some of the new obstacles faced by other sales teams especially after the pandemic and what can you learn from it? 
• How has the buying process changed in light of COVID-19?
• How can sales teams continue to have meaningful conversations?
• Is it ok to be cold-calling or emailing prospects right now?
• What type of messaging should be used in cold outreach to build relationships without pissing off your prospects?
• What can sales, success & marketing teams do together in this time?
• - With layoffs dominating your team’s LI feed, how do you continue to motivate your sales reps?

This period is going to be a make or break time for many organizations. Speed & direction of decisions is going to be crucial. This eBook is our attempt to help sales teams make some of these decisions. The only way we come out of this with our feet on the ground is if we help each other in these testing times. Hence, feel free to share this eBook with anyone who you think might benefit from this.

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want more insights?

schedule a one-on-one with our founder, Shruti Kapoor