Sales Leaders, it is time to get real. With your customers. With your company. With yourself.
One month into stay at home mode, I’ve made an observation about how companies that sell us products are changing their messaging. They’ve gone deep into their playbooks to the chapter on empathy. And that is the only play they are running right now.
The phrases in the commercials are all blending for me. We’re in this together. We’re with you. You can count on us. We understand how you feel.
Really?
Look, I realize that at some point I bought a car, or insurance, or a sandwich from you. Maybe I stayed at your hotel or flew on your plane. I appreciate the sentiment you are trying to communicate to me in your advertising. But you are not part of my emotional support system. I just need to solve problems that I’ve never had before.
None of us have been through anything remotely like the global situation we find ourselves in right now. Almost everyone in the business world thinks about worst case scenarios, and how they’ll react to them. If you read a company’s annual report, you can find them in the beginning. In addition to the various competitive threats and supply chain interruption risks, there are potential macroeconomic trend risks. Political instability. Military conflict. Shifts in fiscal and monetary policies. Exchange rate risk. Unforeseen fluctuations in cattle, crops, raw materials, energy, weather.
This is different. Unless you are a thought leader in the scientific community or government or a macroeconomist, you probably didn’t see anything like the COVID-19 global pandemic coming. That leaves most of us. You didn’t predict all your business risks coming true at the same time. None of us did.
Empathy is indeed critical at this time. That’s why we’re wearing masks at the grocery store. For sales leaders who have responsibility for customer facing relationships, or support people who do, it is time to wake up. Time to get practical. Time to think differently. Right now.
Related: Problem Solving Style. Does your Team Have One?
Go Vertical in Communication
As a salesperson or sales leader, the bulk of your communication occurs with the stakeholders who are adjacent to you in the customer relationship. Your customer and your management team. You solve problems and deliver solutions in that space through timely and effective communication. That’s not enough anymore.
The nature of the coronavirus impact means that every level of the supply chain, from consumer to raw material supplier, has changed. Consumers have changed the way they buy products from retailers. Retailers have changed the way they order from distributors. Distributors have changed the way they work with manufacturers. Manufacturers are producing products differently. Suppliers have changed their manufacturing inputs. There is no status quo.
It is no longer acceptable to continue your conventional communication practices with your closest stakeholders. Because of the end to end disruption in normal business operations, you must go further. There is simply not enough insight to leverage in those relationships anymore. You must understand the challenges faced by each participant in the supply chain in order to bring appropriate solutions to all these stakeholders. Practical solutions. That is the only way you can survive this crisis and rebuild once it begins to pass.
Here is an example. You can think you are solving your distributor’s core problem by easing pricing or extending terms. That will surely help. But if their retailer customer is closed, or relying on delivery or pick up transactions only, they have different problems. Product freshness. Promotional support. Product mix. Physical logistics. Gaps in allied products they didn’t need for their on-premise business.
And what about the retailer? How do they reach customers now? How do they pay their rent? Do they have delivery vehicles or are they using a third party? What are their new costs? Can they survive? If they can’t, how will that impact your distributor’s business? Your business?
And what about your production team and their supply chain? Have raw materials been interrupted? Is there an impact to a product you need because your company can’t produce it efficiently? How does that impact your distributor, and their retailers? Is there a substitute product you can turn to, or can you source a brand new product for your distributor?
You can’t understand all these questions unless you are talking to everyone in the supply chain. Now. I’m not talking about the inefficient game of telephone with everyone on the chain. You don’t have the luxury of time anymore. It is up to you to connect everyone, so you are solving problems in real time. It is time to get real.
Related: The Power of “I Don’t Know” – Do You Have It?
Prioritize the Problems
Once you open lines of communication this broadly, you’ll face a seemingly unmanageable set of problems to solve. Each level of the supply chain will have a set of challenges spanning their entire function. You’ve heard many describe these times as unprecedented. That’s because they are.
First things first. Cast a net around all the problems faced by each of the stakeholders in your business. Pull out your empathy hat here. You must see the situation from the vantage point of each function. How does the retailer see their problems? The distributor? The production teams? Suppliers of raw materials? You can only do this by engaging with each. See the problems through their eyes. Start making lists. Brainstorm. Don’t challenge ideas or try to solve things at this stage.
Once you’ve got your lists, compare them. Which problems are big, and which are small? Are there common problems or points of intersection? Are there problems unique to a specific stakeholder? Are there problems where you can identify yourself or another stakeholder as the person best equipped to solve it? Make charts, Venn diagrams, whiteboard groupings, whatever. Gain agreement from all stakeholders that these are all the problems that can be identified at this stage.
Next, make another agreement about how you will prioritize these problems. In normal times, you would probably identify the biggest problems first and direct thinking and resources toward solving them. But these aren’t normal times. Now we’re talking about survival. Day to day, week to week survival. Think differently.
Identify big, medium, and small problems. But in this case, prioritize those problems that will sustain your business and can be solved easily. Remember that we are likely to be in a constricted economic environment for months. Even after business begins to resume, consumers are likely to return to prior habits slowly. You must survive and flourish along that curve as it progresses.
Make your prioritized lists with the other stakeholders. Agree to work on the low hanging fruit, while you chip away at the big problems. You’ll need those solutions when business returns to pre-pandemic levels.
Ask Good Questions to Identify Good Solutions
I’ve learned a very important success factor in my many years of problem solving, either by myself or as part of a team. The best solutions arise as a result of asking the best questions, not by coming up with magical solutions. Incomplete or faulty solutions occur as a result of asking too few questions.
Remember, this has never happened before, at least not in our lifetimes. If you rely on your standard playbooks for problem solving, you’ll have serious gaps in terms of past insights you can draw upon. Surface new questions about what you are facing. Uncomfortable questions for all stakeholders. Understand the point of no return for retailers, distributors, production, suppliers. At what level can they no longer operate. Can their operations change in some way to keep operations going? Through charity or for the public good? Can they address new audiences, produce new products, or repurpose operations in some other way to avoid a complete halt? Are there new marketing tactics that can be explored, especially if the retailer is forced to attract new consumers or expand or change their product or service offering?
Ask as many questions as the team can surface. Don’t worry about answering them at this stage. Consider this another brainstorming session. Once you have a full list, begin to identify people who can come up with solutions. Knowledge experts on the topics. If you can’t identify those people, identify the people in the stakeholder chain who can. Understand that some of the people who can help solve these problems will be outside of the chain.
While this feels like a drawn-out process, it cannot be. You don’t have time for that. You need to complete the problem identification and question surfacing steps in a day or two. Then, you should allow a few more days for all to leave and do the work of surfacing possible solutions. Owners of this work need to return to the stakeholder team with at least a few options for each problem they have been assigned.
Solicit feedback from the group, refine options, and choose the best, or perhaps the least bad option to pursue. Do not spend time trying to refine suggestions into the perfect solution. Perfection doesn’t live here. Just come up with good solutions and move forward to implement them. You can course correct as needed.
Related: Business Problem Solving – Managing vs. Exploring
Track, Adapt and React
This isn’t a typical implementation of business strategy and tactics. So, you can’t take a typical approach of setting things into motion and coming back at a later date to review the results. This is a crisis. You need to bring crisis management skills to bear to achieve the results you want.
Keep your stakeholder team together and engaged. Agree on the metrics and other observable results you’ll track to assess progress and determine success. Discuss the results weekly if that is the right frequency. Do it more or less frequently if appropriate. Conduct rich discussions with a core team and be flexible enough to bring others into your review meetings so you can solve problems on the spot when they arise. Agree on changes to tactics and strategy and move quickly to implementation when you have clear indicators that changes are needed.
Repeat this process on your meeting frequency timeline. Adapt and revise your plan on a rolling basis. Remember, perfection is not your ally here. Speed and simplicity are. Keep the team moving forward. Surface new problems and put them through the process you’ve followed to this point. Start chipping away at those big problems. Get your business flywheel turning slowly, then gradually increase its speed. Keep elevating the baseline and grow from each new level you reach.
Just keep going.
Make no mistake. I am a very big advocate for genuine empathy in business. You must be able to walk in your customers’ shoes. Understand what keeps them up at night. See their challenges and opportunities from their perspectives. This is certainly true today as we come to grips with an historic crisis. A crisis that will be taught in history books for generations.
But empathy is not the only tool you need right now. Do not overplay it. The difference in the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is that the impact is shared. We are all feeling it together. There is less of a need to demonstrate that you understand what your customer is going through. You are going through it too.
Now, more than ever, it is time for you to be practical. Concrete. It is time for you to connect everyone upstream and downstream from where you live in the customer relationship.
You alone as a sales professional have that ability. The ability to deliver results through timely and positive communication and action.
Go to work.
Lead well.
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