In the midst of a pandemic, a prospect might not respond to a company’s tried-and-true sales pitch the same way they once would. COVID-19 has forced sales departments across Boston tech to strategize in order to continue bringing in revenue while businesses adapt to a socially-distant world.
As a machine learning-based solution for optimizing enterprise tail spend, Fairmarkit adjusted its traditional pitch over the past month. CEO and Co-Founder Kevin Frechette said the business needed to accommodate the new concerns of customers and prospects, like layoffs and finding cost savings. To do so, the customer success team created a heat map that determined how clients are impacted by the business effects of the virus. And to further increase transparency and assist with deals already in the works, the sales team assigned a COVID-19 risk score to active projects. This score helps reps determine the additional resources a client might need during this time.
“We’d like everyone at the company on the same page and staying up to date on the needs of our customers,” Frechette said.
How have you adapted your sales pitch in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak?
The three core challenges that COVID-19 presents are reductions in productivity for most teams due to either working from home or people being laid off, the disruption of traditional supply chain channels, and organizations showing significant cost savings and wins in a relatively short period of time.
Instead of using our standard pitch, we have made sure that our solution aligns with those challenges. We focused more heavily on automating manual processes, using machine learning vendor identification to find additional suppliers and opening our sourcing scope from tail-spend to larger transactions to help achieve larger cost-savings goals. Additionally, we over-communicate that customers can operationalize Fairmarkit in under 30 days. Finally, we put a massive focus on helping with personal protection equipment for customers and prospects.
Sales leadership generated a COVID-19 risk score for all of our active projects.”
What’s a change you’ve made to your overall workflow since switching to remote work?
We have made a much greater effort to over-communicate since switching to remote work. Rather than just sending a Slack message, we put an emphasis on FaceTiming and Zoom meetings to avoid things slipping through the cracks. Over-communicating is key when it comes to working remotely and our goal is to check-in and support one another as much as possible.
In addition, we’ve also been using our people management platform to take weekly pulse surveys of the team to ensure we are getting real-time feedback from individuals. We want to understand how we can help and where we can make changes to improve.
What does cross-team collaboration look like for your team these days?
Our customer success department created a COVID-19 heat map across all our customers. It defines how they’re impacted specifically, what KPIs or initiatives have been prioritized or deprioritized and what our mutual attack plan is with them to help them achieve their goals. The maps are reviewed company-wide and updated on a recurring basis. We also leverage call recordings and have been more stringent about reviewing calls. We’d like everyone at the company to be on the same page and staying up to date on the needs of our customers.
Additionally, our sales leadership generated a COVID-19 risk score for all of our active projects to help determine where the sales team can use additional executive support on deals. We then took that risk score and helped identify customers that may be in need of additional services our company can provide and were proactive in reaching out to them. Lastly, we are sharing success stories internally and on LinkedIn to ensure the sales team has credibility and the necessary materials going into their sales calls with prospects.
