Customer Empathy may be a thing of the future

[The #Rebound series focuses on various aspects of business that need to be reimagined for a post-Covid world.]

During pandemics, like in war, people reach out to one another more than ever. 

Both events have the strange, unintended effect of forcing teamwork upon all of us. Public emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic enable us to brush away identity schisms and drive our energies towards punching through the dark clouds. People tend to go beyond their call of duty.

Something similar is playing out in the corporate world. Empathy, in the pre-Covid times, was seen as a key trait of those bearing a product or a service to the market; it’s a quality that salespeople needed to exude—“their wellbeing is ours”. But rarely have sellers been in a dystopian global milieu in which empathy is not just desirable but an organizational ask. Now, more than ever, companies are putting a lot of heart into it. 

Lending a hand

As an emergency response to the lockdowns, companies across the globe arrayed a massive Covid relief that included freeing up some of their products or putting off dues for months. Particularly in the Software-as-a-Service world, companies were quick to extend a helping hand to customers. In the post-Covid world, this collective act, done impulsively in the face of a global pandemic, could turn into an uncertainty planning that businesses may have to internalize.

“Our values are around empathy and togetherness,” said Francois Grenier, Head of Tech Partnerships at Barcelona-based online form builder TypeForm, in a recent webinar on ‘Re-thinking the sales funnel’. “Right now, it’s even more relevant to own those values and make sure they transpire in every interaction with customers.”

We tuned into a bunch of webinars to figure what senior sales leaders—including some from Silicon Valley—envisage as the major changes in their field. Here are the most relevant:

The ideal customer profile is changing 

One of the significant changes wrought by the pandemic is the upending of the notion of an ideal customer. In a matter of weeks, that travel website or that twin-property hospitality partner you sold to without much effort is no longer your customer! A government agency hammering out a multi-city relief plan for Covid victims is lapping up your products; an e-learning company specializing in math for children under 10 has just signed on as a customer of your CRM. Healthcare firms are lapping up your chat software. For many internet-based sellers of business-to-business software, it’s been a humbling change. 

“We’ve had to take a relook at ideal customer profiles. We are seeing newer industries showing a lot of interest, coming in through inbound,” says Karthik Rajaram, Global Director of sales development at Freshworks. “This has made us start work on a new playbook to ensure we service the new verticals effectively.”

Getting remote with a vengeance

Already, the calls have started streaming in. Across sectors, from tertiary healthcare to your local mom-and-pop store, an online identity has become more important than ever. The pandemic has truly delivered a wave that is pushing businesses reluctant about going online. 

Take the example of Typeform, which helps companies have conversations with their customers through online forms. Grenier, their head of technology partnerships, says there is a deluge of small store owners who want to be in touch with their customers, and they all want to be online. “People are coming in with new use cases. The typical profiles that are not a big part of our customer base for us are coming to us in bigger crowds because we are helping them. These are businesses that never had an online approach to their businesses.”  

This is opening a whole host of business opportunities in:

  1. Online marketing
  2. Setting up secure remote environments
  3. Transitioning to online-first approaches 

Prepare for a value rush

Sales leaders anticipate that customers will cast a stern look at spending on new products, or even evaluate extending licences, given throttled cash-flows in the post-Covid world. Customers may look closely at return on investments, product lifecycles, and feature enhancements before they commit funds. On top of all that, there will linger a key question on their minds: Is there a cheaper alternative in the market. 

In a world order where there is an overall constraint on spending, companies that come to the market with a diversified product portfolio would be seen as offering more value. 

“People who have thought about multiple products, multiple leverage points in their platforms, multiple TAMs (total addressable markets] would be able to bounce back stronger,” says Vinod Chandramouli, Head of India and ASEAN Businesses for Freshworks.

Back to school

Cliched as it may sound, the more things appear to change, the more they remain the same. If anything, the outbreak of the new Coronavirus has forced us to go back to the fundamental concepts driving trade. It is prodding us to optimize sales pipelines and see if there are rationalizations to be made. One of the textbook references is about how an ideal sales pipeline should look. Typically, it is wide at the lead generation side and narrows down at closure. Well, the ideal pipeline should just look like what it is—a pipeline. 

Extracted from a webinar hosted by the Sales Management Association, the picture depicts the ideal sales pipeline. Such a funnel is possible only if salespersons prune out unviable prospects right at the mouth of the funnel, and go after prospects as diligently as possible. In a post-Covid world where Go-to-Market strategies are expected to get redefined based on new value propositions, getting your sales pipeline right could help companies make inroads quicker. 

Some things may never be the same again

Sales leaders have made predictions about how customer preferences could irrevocably change because of Covid. It is, truly, one of the most sweeping global events in living memory, and the pandemic could indelibly alter us. For example, we may become a people who always account for uncertainty in our lives. This means individuals—some not all—may develop a strangely ominous outlook about indebtedness. Is it worth it to go for a vehicle loan to buy that luxury car? But they may be more willing to spend much more than they did on healthcare, wellness and hygiene. Salespersons will find that these changes will have a subtle but widely prevalent impact on overall spending and may have to tweak their market strategies. 

Well, they’ll figure out. If there’s one thing that happens all the time, it’s sales.