I’m sure you all would agree with me if I say that the best part of the famous TV show F.R.I.E.N.D.S is its title song. I just love that song. Especially that line in the song which says– When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year. This line explains what a lot of companies went through in the last couple of years. Surely the period of the pandemic has been no less than a rollercoaster ride for a lot of companies.

• Some companies had difficulty adjusting to the changing business environment
• Some businesses have seen huge losses
• And some others have gone down altogether

But through our research, we have found out that certain companies did things differently and emerged out victorious from this pandemic.

In this blog, we are going to explore what exactly did the high-growth and successful companies do in order to achieve success even during a time of crisis:

Things Successful Companies did Differently during the pandemic

1. They have quickly and readily adapted to the changes

2020 was a time when everything around us was changing rapidly and unexpectedly. And this was no different in the world of business. While a lot of companies couldn’t adjust to these sudden changes and had fallen prey to them, high-growth firms recognized the need to change their business model, adjusted sales expectations, and viewed the situation as a positive change rather than something that permanently damages their business.

They had a strong sales team who were able to promptly respond to those changes and carried out their operations smoothly and successfully. They took the new work environment and selling situations in their stride which turned out to be a huge asset to their company.

This suggests that a firm’s willingness to be flexible to the changes plays a critical role in it staying afloat during rough seas.

2. They have been able to engage Salespeople in remote work

While 2020 forced us all into the new normal of remote work, this did not stop the high-growth companies from keeping their employees engaged and productive even during this crisis.

They have used gamification and various other creative techniques to keep their staff engaged, motivated and productive. For example

• They have kept their work culture intact by encouraging the employees to do formal or informal meetings at least once a week
• They promoted teamwork by assigning tasks that should be done through collaboration
• They engaged and motivated their employees in their work and learning activities by gamifying those activities

3. They kept their training initiatives active and pivoted their training in response to the changes

The new normal of remote work which came into force in 2020 has forced all of us to operate remotely. While this posed a major challenge for companies to carry out their normal business functions, it was an even greater challenge to keep their training initiatives on. But successful companies made sure that they do not compromise on their training programs even when all their trainers and trainees were operating remotely.

They made sure that they provide training to their sales teams from time to time through various virtual channels. They used various creative ways to make that training effective and impactful. They have gamified the training activities in order to engage the learners in the training. They also used some creative training techniques like microlearning, gamified quizzes, video coaching to encourage the learners to adopt self-learning and make continuous efforts to improve their skills.

4. They focused on coaching their reps for the new normal

Another major thing that the sales reps had to do during the pandemic was to shift their selling from face-to-face to virtual. While this may sound simple, it actually required the sales reps to make a lot of changes in the way they did their sales pitches and sales meetings. Because they needed to be as effective on virtual channels as they were in face-to-face meetings.

So, the high-growth companies focused on providing consistent coaching to the reps in order to help them to excel in their virtual selling skills. They encouraged and incentivized their sales managers to coach each rep in their team, at least once every 15 days. They leveraged technology to carry out their coaching. And they’ve conducted some creative coaching activities like gamified video coaching, gamified role plays, etc which engaged the reps in the coaching activities and motivated them to learn and improve themselves in virtual selling.

5. They developed content to engage customers

Modern-day buyers believe in doing their research and knowing all about a company even before they get in touch with a sales rep of that company. This behavioral shift amongst buyers began long before the pandemic. But they started consuming the content online more after the pandemic began.

The high-growth companies recognized this trend early on and realized the importance of creating engaging content which can be shared with the buyers. So they got their sales and marketing teams to work together to develop content that engages buyers at various stages of the sales cycle. This helped the buyers greatly in making their purchase decisions.

6. They shifted to Everboarding

We all know how important the onboarding period is for new sellers. But during the pandemic when onboarding was limited to just the virtual channels it became extremely difficult for the companies to ramp up their new hires quickly and assimilate them into their company’s work culture. So, as a solution to this, the high-growth companies have adopted a creative strategy known as “Everboarding”.

Everboarding is a new-age approach to corporate new hire training that focuses on knowledge retention, mastery of subjects and skills. This approach recognizes that

• The training has to be a continuous and consistent effort
• And learners need repeated exposure to training content in order to remember, retain and gain mastery of the important concepts and skills.

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