How the coronavirus pandemic has affected companies' approaches to sales, marketing and UX analysis

The coronavirus pandemic has affected virtually every industry in nearly every country in the world. The economy is slowing down, entire industries were forced to stop working and cannot fully restore it, the amount of free money that people are willing to spend on consumption is declining. Under these conditions, companies are forced to become more flexible and change traditional approaches to doing business, marketing and sales.



In a new article, I prepared an overview of such changes and provided links to relevant studies and statistics.

Changing the approach to sales

During the global quarantine, work moved to a remote format. This has dramatically affected the activity of traditional sales managers. They usually set up many offline meetings for discussions, presentations, and product demos.



Now, up to 85% of users conduct their own research before making a purchase decision online. In such circumstances, the traditional approach to sales is ineffective. The sales manager should focus not on running a demo, but on building personalized relationships.



This work can even be expressed in small things. For example, according to Gong statistics, using a webcam to call potential buyers increases the likelihood of a sale by 41%.

Moving from offline to online marketing

Advertising budgets of companies are massively shrinking, and therefore fewer and fewer of them can afford expensive placements on offline billboards. According to HubSpot, traffic to sites increased 16% between Q1 and Q2 2020, and email open rates were 18% higher than before COVID-19.



With this, there are more online marketing tactics that allow businesses to even conduct prompt international expansion at no extra cost. So the expert and owner of his own marketing agency Alexander Lashkov in his researchin the journal Practical Marketing described a technique for bringing startups to the US and Latin American markets using sites using User-Generated Content. As a result, reaching tens of thousands of potential customers around the world can cost several hundred dollars.

From funnel to flywheel

While the term sales funnel focuses primarily on customer acquisition, the flywheel model is built around improving their experience at every step of their interactions with the company. When a business uses this tactic, the customer is at the center of all processes.



In order to make this transition, companies define key business metrics that allow monitoring progress. Second, the flywheel segments are highlighted that have the greatest impact on these metrics and those elements that are worth strengthening.



An example of using this approach - HubSpot implementedthe ability to independently purchase the company's software, whereas before that it was necessary to contact the sales manager. In addition, improved performance is possible by reducing friction when a client moves from the area of ​​responsibility of one department in the company to another.



For example, if these employees do not have historical customer engagement data after moving from sales manager to customer support, this will lead to delays and a degraded user experience.

Conclusion: pandemic as a trigger for development

The economic hardships caused by the global quarantine have forced companies that did not benefit from the pandemic to become more efficient. Therefore, experiments began very quickly to abandon less effective promotion channels, change approaches to sales and analyze user experience.