How can I grow my business if I can’t meet my clients?

The inability or restrictions to travel and physically meet with clients has severely tested well-established sales practices: how can I grow my business if I can’t meet my clients?

This is the question echoing in the minds of entrepreneurs and managers who find themselves facing this period of major changes and extreme uncertainty. A challenge that – as highlighted in Lenovys’ latest Covid Business Checkup – is relevant for 64% of Italian companies, one-third of which consider themselves unprepared to properly address this issue.

Indeed, this is a critical matter for many companies, particularly those operating in the B2B sector, where sales visits are one of the main tools for building client relationships and, consequently, generating business. In addition, the inability to attend trade fairs and conferences deprives companies of a primary tool for establishing new connections and identifying new prospects to nurture and convert into clients.

Several questions are crowding the minds of entrepreneurs and managers right now:

• What new “connections” should we put in place?
• How can we support current or potential clients, build trust, empathize, and generate value through new interaction processes?
• How can we make the most of our sales team‘s skills and capabilities if they cannot travel?

The risk is falling in love with the latest technology and focusing on the tool deemed most suitable, only to see your efforts and investments thwarted by unsatisfying results.

If you too find yourself reflecting on these questions and evaluating which digital tools to adopt for managing client relationships, here are some useful foods for thought to understand the problem and identify high-value solutions for the short and medium term.

1. Map the buying process and its specific pain points

The first step is to map the buying process. How do clients become aware of, gather information on, and decide to purchase our products and services? At a high level, any buying process can be broken down into 5 phases:

Obviously, depending on the business and the specific sector, some of these phases may be more relevant and complex than others.

A useful tip is to consider two different buying processes:

• For established clients who have already bought from you
• For new potential clients.

Established clients and potential clients usually have different needs that must be managed accordingly.
The second step is to understand the pain the client faces throughout this process.

• Which of the actions does the client usually perform are no longer feasible due to travel restrictions?
• In which phases do the client find themselves alone, without the possibility of being supported by one of our experts?
• Can they easily find information to guide them toward the best choice?
• How can they understand what the best solution is?

Try to answer these questions and identify the challenges the client faces while trying to solve their problems and achieve their goals through the purchase of products and services.

2. Add value for the client

Reflecting on the buying process will bring to light a series of difficulties that clients encounter along their journey. Each of the identified pain points represents a massive opportunity to improve the client relationship and differentiate yourself from the competition. The underlying goal is to add value to your client through interaction at different stages of the buying process, ensuring you are perceived as distinct from your competitors.

The way you relate to your clients must be built to make it easy for them to buy your product or service, and to clearly explain and demonstrate why your solution is the right one to meet their needs, far more than those of your competitors. This must be the goal toward which your client relationship system should strive.

From a practical standpoint, the recommendation is to initially build an “ideal state”, the ultimate solution you would implement if you had no constraints on time, cost, and resources. Once your ideal state is defined, progressively introduce time, cost, and resource constraints, and design your feasible “future state” by subtraction. This approach will provide a clear idea of what the ideal solution should look like, the ultimate target to aim for, and will allow you to plan the operational steps to progressively move closer to it.

3. Planning

Once your future state is defined, meaning how you want the client interaction to develop, in which phases, and with what messages, it is time to identify the best tools and technology to support that future state. However, before rushing into implementation, pause to reflect and define the characteristics the tool must have to be truly valuable to your client.
In this case, the Concept Paper is a highly useful tool. As described by Luciano Attolico in the book “Lean Development and Innovation: Hitting the Market with the Right Products at the Right Time” (Routledge 2018):

“The main objective of the Concept Paper is to align processes, people, and tools before starting any project activity. Putting down in black and white what lies ahead before product development, through a structured sharing process, […] can hold enormous value, especially when one can go deep into the social side of the sharing process and formalize the key points needed to clarify customer needs. […] Striving to synchronize all answers and, above all, aligning all answers before starting the project becomes strategic, because it becomes clear that, otherwise, unresolved problems and conflicts would just be waiting to re-emerge later in the subsequent phases of the project.”

This phase is essential for getting all organizational functions on board (particularly marketing and sales), which will then have to adapt their way of working to fully leverage the new customer interaction models and prevent any execution-stage issues.

4. Define and activate “change agents” by developing the right skills

The introduction of digital tools to interact differently with clients requires changing the well-established behaviors of sales reps and all people involved. It becomes crucial to create a genuine network of change agents within the company and as part of business transformation projects.
What skills will we need to develop for these figures?
The ones they don’t teach you at school, university, and very rarely in companies.
Some examples include creative problem solving, communication, collaboration, effective delegation, feedback techniques, and a critical analysis of the context.
And the most important skill of all: the capacity for rapid change.

By following these steps, you will be able to review your way of interacting with clients and be perceived as different from the competition, thereby growing your business.