As an enterprise software business, keeping your sales pipeline flowing is essential. With the worldwide economy in flux, Storm Ventures hosted a number of virtual roundtables for sales and marketing leaders from several of our portfolio companies and invited them to share problems and solutions on how they’ve adapted to the current climate.

The discussion focused on three areas — marketing, sales, and employee satisfaction:

Marketing Issues:

• Cold calling potential customers has become more challenging so alternative channels are needed.
• With increased online activity, it became harder to cut through the noise so the quality of leads is going down.

Sales Problems:

• Deals are taking longer to close and getting smaller. They are getting stuck at the last hurdle because purchasing behavior has changed.
• The economic downturn is creating a pricing pressure and price seems to be an important decision making factor.

Employees Motivational Challenges:

• The challenges of keeping a remote team engaged during tough economic times ring true through every sector.

Secret #1: Double-down on empathy & agility to generate leads

According to Kieran King at Talkdesk, the key is to think of solution offerings that can help customers respond effectively to COVID and its impact on their business — for example, solutions for working from home or that apply directly to a locked-down economy:

“We are helping enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation plans, develop resilience, reimagine a sustainable way to reform their CX strategies.”

Kieran King, Senior Vice President, Customer Success at Talkdesk

Digital Shadows, a cybersecurity company, has developed customized bundles oriented towards remote workers:

“We set up Digital Shadows to deal with the digital risks companies face outside their perimeter. Now, everyone is outside the perimeter and organizations are struggling to deal with the new risks this suddenly poses to their security. As such, we have put together a set of educational remote worker security materials and recently ran a webinar full of advice on the topic that was our best attended one ever. We created a new remote worker bundle to match that has got great traction since its launch with clients and partners alike”.

Alastair Paterson, Digital Shadows

For any customer who has stalled in their sales pipeline since the COVID crisis, Honeycomb has offered complimentary online consulting:

“So, we have offered up 30 minutes to an hour of consultancy time, we call office hours, with our thought leader Liz Fong-Jones. It’s not about selling. She helps evangelize about observability with our prospects; so that when clarity comes, they will feel confident that they can move forward with us and open up the budget.”

Chad Malchow, Vice President of Sales at Honeycomb

Other helpful advice to reach potential customers is to leverage your existing customer base and ask for advocacy and referrals:

“We’ve been successful selling through downturns before, which is how we know that one of the easiest places to sell right now is your existing install accounts, and so we’ve mobilized around that. We’ve developed what we call a Rapid Response Team, which is a team of virtual executives that call into all of these existing accounts.”

Todd Gracon, VP of Sales at Workato

Leveraging channel partners might also open avenues to gain new customers. Channel partners have existing trusted relationships and local connections so it could be an easier way to build out new connections in this environment.

“Partner lead sharing is a very important, under-tapped way to generate high-quality leads. We’ve been working hard to increase these partner referrals. The best partners are adjacent, non-competing ‘friendlies’ whose Sales and CS teams are also talking to our target personas and accounts. The key is to help them understand when to bring each other in, keeping it simple for already-busy AEs.”

Scott Milener, VP Global Sales, Blueshift

Finally, to build an accurate picture of customer needs, SignalWire launched a live chat capability on their website to quickly collate customer queries. As a result, they’ve got direct feedback from prospects about what they want and what they’re looking for.

Secret #2: Rock your content to create new opportunities

Changing the type of content you publish to generate leads was a common answer. Trevor Templar, CEO of Aviso, suggested an emphasis on long-form content and Ashley Stirrup, CMO of Algolia, proposed differentiating your marketing messaging based on how your customers are doing in the current environment, thus communicating that you’re in tune with their individual priorities and needs:

“We have other marketing messaging for those people who are booming, in terms of how do you manage your business in times of peak demand. For customers who are struggling, we’ve provided temporary credits and special access to advanced features with the goal of being a good partner and turning them into more valuable customers in the long term.”

Ashley Stirrup, CMO of Algolia

Dan Beltramo, CEO of Onclusive, has also found that attendance at their webinars has spiked and as a result, they are trying to ramp up content production, seeing it as the best way to stay connected with customers.

Secret #3: Be smart about free trials & discounts

Offering free trials as an incentive was a recurring theme in our discussion. This has been adopted by Algolia, a web search & discovery startup, and Todd Gracon, VP of Sales at Workato, surmised that businesses should expect customers to be asking for discounts in this climate and plan accordingly.

At SignalWire the sales teams have created a playbook to help respond to requests for COVID discounts on a case-by-case basis. But if you are going to hand out discounts, advises Nigel Thomas, VP of Worldwide Sales, you should only do so if customers agree to a longer-term commitment and a compulsory upgrade back to the standard price after an agreed amount of time.

“We are judging a COVID-19 discount on a case-by-case basis, as in whether the discount is related to something like healthcare and is warranted, or is just quite frankly procurement phishing. We’ve laid out a playbook for salespeople to help them deal with that.”

Nigel Thomas, VP of Worldwide Sales at Signawire

Co-CEO and founder of Winning by Design Jacco van der Kooij pointed out that any discount must mean 100% pre-payment of the next term — and that using the term ‘today’s full price’ might be helpful.

“If you get that request for the second year and you want to give them the full price, push back and say “at today’s current full price”. That means a year from now, the price will normally be higher, and for any services company that will mean 100% up-front payment”.

Co-CEO and founder of Winning by Design Jacco van der Kooij

The use of language and terminology when negotiating was a recurring theme. Kieran King, SVP of Customer Success at Talkdesk, suggested refraining from using the word ‘free.’ Instead, use the term ‘complimentary’ as they are designed to instill the business value that can convert down the road.

“Be careful of the word ‘free.’ When offering a complimentary service to help customers during COVID-19, it is vital not to undersell it. The offerings are designed to produce a business outcome, which has a material impact that should not be devalued.”

Kieran King, SVP of Customer Success at Talkdesk

Secret #4: Remain flexible in your sales approach

It was also widely agreed that the flexibility of the sales approach is important — for example, approaching different roles as the first point of contact. C-level execs are easier to access now as they are traveling less and may be responsive to empathetic communication:

“We don’t just have one buyer in a group. You could be sales ops, marketing ops, HR ops, finance ops, you name it. We’re going back to our existing accounts and saying hey, here’s a 10x10 grid, or the 15 people in that account that we most want to go after. And we’re trying to leverage partners to help us open up new points of contact.”

Todd Gracon, VP of Sales at Workato

Finally, Christof Baumgartner from MobileIron advised focusing on existing customers by offering fresh solutions to new urgencies or add on services that reflect emerging problems in the current climate.

“We noticed that customers are focused on business continuity. So messages around debt are important. It was important for us to let customers know that we slowed down on certain processes that would be any risk for them. Customers do not want big IT projects right now, it’s just a risk for them.”

Christof Baumgartner, VP of Sales EMEA at MobileIron

Secret #5: Become more mindful of your management style

Some, like Todd from Workato, spoke of more frequent check-ins and strategy sessions with his team than in normal times. He noted that the current crisis is especially hard for mid-market reps. In the past, Todd did a once a week call with the team but now checks in three times a week.

A word of caution came from Jacco from Winning by Design: Try to avoid Zoom overload!

“We’ve seen companies successfully using either Soapbox or Loom to shoot at the manager a 3.5-minute video on your point and then send it across if you just want to do status updates on what’s going on. That doesn’t take an hour or even 20 minutes, that takes five minutes and they can watch it at their own leisure.”

Co-CEO and founder of Winning by Design Jacco van der Kooij

Kent Holland from Copper shared his solution which is to communicate wins to bolster enthusiasm (without getting so fixated on the wins, however, that you miss the fundamentals driving the business):

“Given we are a high-velocity team and traditionally had an inside sales model, I put careful thought into how to keep team culture and cohesion going. Our Sales team is in the 25 to 35-year-old range and they still thrive off a lot of that energy, so it’s really important to find ways to replicate that. We’ve relied on Slack to celebrate wins, and I’ve found increasing value from really leaning in with the team on customer calls and internal meetings.”

Kent Holland, VP of Sales at Copper

All the sales leaders shared inventive ways to keep their team motivated through this difficult time — from online workouts, history lessons, and virtual chess to movie nights and pet happy hours.

Trevor Rodrigues-Templar, CEO and President at Aviso, and Amit Pande, CMO and VP, Strategy at Aviso, rightly pointed out the need to be empathic with employee’s home situations and to measure and track productivity to keep people motivated. There is a risk that employees could use the current crisis as an excuse to become complacent. To keep his team motivated, some sales leaders keep quotas consistent with pre-COVID levels while offering incentives to achieve 70–75% of their target.

If you want more…

We hope that some of these real-world solutions from sales leaders at successful enterprise businesses will help you adapt your sales and marketing strategies. We’ll be doing more webinars with our portfolio companies on other challenges. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about using remote selling techniques in the enterprise, check out this research from our partners at Winning By Design.