Is your team getting virtual communication right?
Communication in 2019 meant something different than it does in 2020. While email, text and instant messages, and virtual meetings weren’t exactly unpopular by any means, they’ve all exploded even more so and are being used more than ever before due to ongoing physical limitations.
And, in a world that relied much more in physical presence, in-person meetings, and close proximity, there were fewer opportunities for details to get “lost in translation.”
Think about it. In the “pre-COVID” world, most salespeople and teams could simply poke their head outside their office, ask a colleague about the progress on a certain account, inquire whether anyone had heard back from a specific lead, confirm a meeting time, and “iron out” other details easily and in real-time.
Today, sales teams are widely spread out, working from home, on a rotating office schedule, or working completely virtually for the foreseeable future.
The real-time, in the moment, physical conversations often eliminated the need for back and forth emails, phone/virtual calls, text messages, Skype conversations and other “non-physical” communications that have completely overtaken our interactions in recent months.
Your team needs to be trained in catching details and ensuring no gaps in communication.
They need to be brought up to speed on processes to ensure email efficiency, recording meetings whenever possible so that they can reference it later, using virtual tasks managers to organize their projects and priorities and so forth.
As a sales leader, it’s wrong to assume that your team has and will continue to communicate as effectively online as they did offline.
There has been a real shift in communication in the past few months especially in the professional world. It’s gone widely undiscussed, likely because most of us were already used to using email, texts, or Zoom prior to the pandemic.
But, the very best sales teams right now understand that these tools aren’t just a matter of convenience anymore, but rather a necessity. Our partners on accounts don’t work across the hallway from us anymore in most cases. Our top salesperson isn’t in front of us during our lunch breaks.
As such, the best teams are formalizing processes to ensure that they’re ready to succeed in an ever-increasing virtual world, not just today, but for the future.
It’s time, if you haven’t already, to do the same.
