Every week I follow up on what our users are doing in our platform and I have found out some interesting data I want to share with you. Upsales have thousands of sales reps using our CRM every day to manage todos, opportunities, and closing deals.
For those of you who don't know how sales reps are working in a B2B organization, I will shortly explain it to you. If you generalize sales it’s a numbers game and if you call enough prospects you will get a meeting and if you have enough meetings you will soon have a deal.
- You need to contact companies who would like to buy your product.
- You need to have meetings to understand the customer's needs and present your solution to their problem.
- You need to send out proposals to customers who are interested in moving forward after the meeting.
- Hopefully, you close some deals.
Last week I focused my analysis on the first step in the sales funnel, which is the number of weekly tasks. I wanted to see if the user's behavior had changed since Covid-19 started to spread in the world. I could sort out our users into four groups;
- Growth explosion — Users in this group have gained a boozed in sales due to the Covid-19 pandemic and also their activity level in their CRM has increased.
- Declined demand — Users in this group have seen a dramatically declined demand for their service and their activity level is also lower than their 12 months average.
- Paralyzed users — Users in this group are in industries that are not affected directly by Covid-19, despite this their activity level is lower than their 12 months average.
- Warriors — Users in this group are in the same industry as group three but I can see a dramatic increase in their activity level.
Warriors
I found companies in sectors that are not, or at least should not be, positively affected due to Covid-19 who are doing quite well in the new landscape (I excluded, for example, companies in the streaming industry and healthcare).
Activity level
Users in this group have increased their activity level by 3x since the pandemic started at the beginning of March. I talked with a Sales Manager at one of the companies in the group and he gave me some more insights on why the activity level is higher than before.
“We understood that Covid-19 could make it hard to sell our product, not because our product is not needed anymore, rather decisions would be postponed into the future. Within the team we had a decision to make; either we will accept the new situation we would be in and make fewer deals, or we could work twice as hard to get the same deals as we did before. We chose to work twice as hard.”
I also called the top-performing user in the Warrior group. During the conversation, I got an understanding of how our recent features had helped him increase his activity level. During the last four months, our Product team has been focusing on smart ways to work effectively and efficiently with your daily tasks as a Sales Representative.
We have launched ways to make it easier to prioritize between your tasks, show in real-time how many calls you have made, and to make it easy to call a contact without needing to enter the phone number on your mobile phone. This latest feature is called Click-to-call.
“With Click-to-call and automatically open the companies website when moving to the next activity has saved me hundreds of clicks per day, meaning that I can call more companies within the same timeframe as before.”
Helping our Warriors
The Product team including myself got inspired by the data and by the interviews we made with some of our customers. We will continue the nearest future to innovate how users are working with their daily tasks and help them be more efficient with their time to help them close more deals.
“You can either get paralyzed by the current situation or you can decide to be a winner and make it happen — Be a warrior and increase your output by 3x.”
Psst — do you want to join our high pace Product team to help companies survive this crisis, check our or job openings here.
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