Surviving Pandemics and Recessions with Outbound Marketing

It’s almost incalculable how much the Coronavirus has affected our everyday life and workflows. While everyone, including customers, has shifted towards work from home (WFH) policies, business owners all over the world are left to wonder: Will we be able to sell our products or services, and what is the best path to profits in such difficult times? 

CIENCE has worked with over 750 companies since 2017, and we believe everything is possible in sales when outbound marketing is part of the Go-to-Market strategy.

Who Is At Risk?

Well, almost everyone. Every B2B company, regardless of size, may have some significant losses to navigate without adjustments. It’s true that small- and mid-sized companies may experience more difficulties than enterprises and big corporations, partly owing to the lack of large cash reserves and the ability to withstand tumult. If no adjustments are made, there is a chance of not recovering – many businesses already have.

The pandemic is real, scary, and causes great amounts of uncertainty – to say nothing of the economic fallout occurring at the same time. But for B2B, white-collar roles there will be a new normal development. The question is whether you’re part of those conversations or not.

Eric Quanstrom, CMO at CIENCE

What Obstacles Are Appearing? How to Navigate Them?

Where challenges exist, the opportunity is around the corner. Let’s take a look at where, precisely, those challenges lie, and how we can turn them into opportunities. 

Remote Work 

Obstacle. It may be challenging for your salespeople to shift towards remote work. Even if the change in the working environment won’t lower their productivity, the additional stress of isolation might. It’s highly likely that outgoing, extroverted salespeople are already struggling with WFH realities. 

It can be argued that prospecting is the most difficult part of sales – goodness knows it’s the #1 most challenging part of the sales process, cited in almost every sales survey.

Conversely, we’ve observed independent, autonomous ability to handle workflows perfectly well across our fleet of hundreds of our own Sales Development Reps (SDRs), as prospecting is all they do. A material difference here has been the ability to keep in touch during all working hours to help, give advice, or just chat.

Opportunity = Personalization. Since everyone is WFH now, why shouldn’t it be a subject line for your email campaigns? Personalization is a huge part of relevance, anyway. The time of the pandemic is no different.

Opportunity = More Time for Emails. Outbound marketing is everything for sales now. Though your potential customers may not be deliberately looking for your product, they will have much more time to consider your offer since they are WFH now too. 

From a purely outbound perspective, and if approached with the requisite empathy and grace, in many cases, decision-makers at companies who are now WFH have far more time as customers to discover new vendors, products, and services for their business. 

Eric Quanstrom

Events cancellations

Obstacle. Events are meant to start sales conversations between its’ attendees.
Successful events are ones where the sponsors come out with stacks of business cards and positive feelings around all sales conversations that were started at the event. 
Meeting your potential customers in person is effective and grows your funnel a lot, but it doesn’t mean that your business will be doomed without them. 

Opportunity = Meet Virtually. Since no events are happening now (virtual excepted – and these do not cost sponsors anywhere remotely close to the Platinum, Gold, etc. package fees), shifting budget towards the next closest alternative is a key concept to leverage.

Next-closest is using outbound to target event attendees, who need a new way to network. For instance, cancellation of events due to the Coronavirus outbreak can be used as a reference point. This can be mentioned as a part of personalization for your email marketing campaigns. 

Possible Shortage of Financial Resources

Obstacle. Some of your customers may leave. That’s totally normal. Maybe they want to save some financial resources by moving away from your type of services or moving on with another vendor. It is important to remember that it happens all the time even in the best of situations. COVID-19 may accelerate this process a bit, but if you leverage this situation right, you will be okay.

Opportunity = Cost-Effective Lead Generation. This is the time to improve your outbound efforts. To keep you funnel growing now, outbound is the one to bet on. Outbound brings new customers in, it is flexible for testing various approaches, and all of that is proved by statistics.

Major Decrease In Website Traffic 

Obstacle. A lot of decision-makers won’t be looking into purchasing and partnering right now, so it means that there will be a decrease in your inbound leads. Though you shouldn’t assume that there is no demand for your services.

Opportunity = Hunt Your Qualified Leads. To fill out the gaps caused by the shortage of inbound leads, you can use outbound marketing. Historically, humanity made its biggest jumps in evolution after, and even during a crisis. CIENCE can help with your company’s evolution.

We’re living through remarkable times. Most business leaders know that times of great upheaval are also a reset to how things were done in the past. Across the map, organizations will be evaluating many new models of how business gets done going forward.

Eric Quanstrom, CMO at CIENCE

Why Is Outbound So Important Now?

We’ve compared outbound and inbound marketing before. In regular non-COVID times, our opinion is as follows – you must use both inbound and outbound because they are essential to growing your funnel. Nowadays inbound will work slower due to the quarantine. That’s why we suggest taking a hard look at outbound, and renewing the age-old phone and email channels. It has a list of advantages, which are critical for growing your business in a situation like this. 

What Do We Do After Pandemic Is Over?

Keep on doing what we do now – find the ways to grow. When the pandemic is over, among those severely affected by the coronavirus, there will be some companies that didn’t go through significant losses but didn’t grow as well. The question will appear in every business: “How do I grow again?”.
It’s important to start expanding as soon as you get the chance. Accelerate through the downturn, accelerate through the crisis. 

Why CIENCE?

CIENCE has faced plenty of challenges during our lifetime, and we wouldn’t still be here if we didn’t know how to learn from and overcome them. We acknowledge that this is a challenging time for everyone across the world. During the times where businesses all over the world face a threat of contraction and shortfalls, we feel that it is our duty to help keep your sales and mood on the bright side – with an assist from outbound marketing. 

We are ready to help with lead generation to grow your sales!