Test H2
Test H3
Shelter-in-place and social distancing guidelines have changed the way B2B selling works. Field sales teams have moved inside for the foreseeable future. Most of their interactions with customers are now virtual. Many B2B sellers assume that inability to use traditional strategies such as onsite meetings and customer dinners has negatively impacted their sales process. However, we believe that this time presents a unique opportunity to learn new ways to cultivate relationships virtually and realize the full productivity potential of B2B virtual selling.
Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint explored the unforeseen benefits of virtual channels for marketing teams and shared his findings in an article. Tomasz looked at the portfolio companies’ experiences with virtual events and observed four things:
(1) 5-10x More Attendees
Virtual events amplify both registrants and attendees by similar multiples. The number of attendees increases by a factor of 5-10x compared to an IRL event.
(2) Easier Execution, Shorter Cycle Time
Because virtual events liberate attendees and organizers from logistics, they can be executed on short notice. Provoked by the right content, audiences will register for an event two or three weeks out. With shorter cycle times between events, marketing teams can accelerate their cadence, learn quicker, and engage more of their ecosystem
(3) Viable Lead Generation Channel
For marketing teams, this is a new muscle to flex, but the immediate impact to lead generation has evinced them virtual events are the future.
(4) New and Valuable Granular Behavior Data
With virtual events, marketing teams can capture more granular data about the behavior of attendees than IRL events. Which vendors did attendees visit? How long did they tarry? Which talks did each person attend?
Is there a way for B2B sellers to leverage virtual experiences with similar success to advance sales cycles? In our experience, the answer to this question is “Yes,” and there is a real opportunity to leverage similar strategies at the later stages of the sales and marketing funnel.
What are the implications for B2B Sales teams?
B2B sellers can cultivate relationships by inviting customers to shared virtual experiences. This approach will help to (1) have additional informal interactions with the stakeholders; (2) engage more members of a buying committee; (3) better understand the strength of your connection; (4) learn more about people and develop trust; (5) differentiate from the competition.
Test H2
Test H3
Shelter-in-place and social distancing guidelines have changed the way B2B selling works. Field sales teams have moved inside for the foreseeable future. Most of their interactions with customers are now virtual. Many B2B sellers assume that inability to use traditional strategies such as onsite meetings and customer dinners has negatively impacted their sales process. However, we believe that this time presents a unique opportunity to learn new ways to cultivate relationships virtually and realize the full productivity potential of B2B virtual selling.
Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint explored the unforeseen benefits of virtual channels for marketing teams and shared his findings in an article. Tomasz looked at the portfolio companies’ experiences with virtual events and observed four things:
(1) 5-10x More Attendees
Virtual events amplify both registrants and attendees by similar multiples. The number of attendees increases by a factor of 5-10x compared to an IRL event.
(2) Easier Execution, Shorter Cycle Time
Because virtual events liberate attendees and organizers from logistics, they can be executed on short notice. Provoked by the right content, audiences will register for an event two or three weeks out. With shorter cycle times between events, marketing teams can accelerate their cadence, learn quicker, and engage more of their ecosystem
(3) Viable Lead Generation Channel
For marketing teams, this is a new muscle to flex, but the immediate impact to lead generation has evinced them virtual events are the future.
(4) New and Valuable Granular Behavior Data
With virtual events, marketing teams can capture more granular data about the behavior of attendees than IRL events. Which vendors did attendees visit? How long did they tarry? Which talks did each person attend?
Is there a way for B2B sellers to leverage virtual experiences with similar success to advance sales cycles? In our experience, the answer to this question is “Yes,” and there is a real opportunity to leverage similar strategies at the later stages of the sales and marketing funnel.
What are the implications for B2B Sales teams?
B2B sellers can cultivate relationships by inviting customers to shared virtual experiences. This approach will help to (1) have additional informal interactions with the stakeholders; (2) engage more members of a buying committee; (3) better understand the strength of your connection; (4) learn more about people and develop trust; (5) differentiate from the competition.
You might be asking yourself if the way people live, work, and interact with each other will change due to the pandemic. The following article from The Atlantic encourages humanity to embrace a more optimistic outlook for the future:
(1) Humans are resilient
“Humanity has endured fires, droughts, civil wars, world wars, earthquakes, terrorism, famines, floods, killer bees, Honey Boo Boo, and near nuclear annihilation.”
(2) Humans always bounce back
“We rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. We rebuilt Chicago after the great fire. We rebuilt Dresden, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. We grieve, adapt, endure, progress. And frequently we thrive. The Black Death was followed by the Renaissance. The 1918 pandemic was followed by the Roaring Twenties.”
(3) Humans transform and grow
“Trauma can even be transformative. Most people are familiar with post-traumatic stress, but the more common reaction is post-traumatic growth (PTG), when people thrive after enduring a negative life-changing event. In one study, more than half of trauma survivors said they felt stronger after their experience and had gained a new appreciation for life.”
What does this mean for the future of work? COVID-19 triggered a major shift to remote work and removed the stigma that was previously associated with working from home. People had to come together to form new norms and learn to collaborate in new ways. As a result, many teams were able to maintain and improve their productivity. Companies uncovered additional sources of savings and economic benefits.
Having experienced this transformation, organizations are rethinking their operating models. A recent Gartner survey reveals that 82% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time after the pandemic. 47% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely all of the time.
The question now facing many leaders is how to manage their remote and hybrid workforces. Surprisingly, just 13% of managers voiced concerns over sustaining productivity. What worries these leaders the most is maintaining company and team culture. Loss of culture is perceived as one of the critical risks for the long-term organizational health and performance.
What are the implications for teams?
Remote work has benefits but requires new strategies for nurturing team culture. Team leaders need to ask themselves: “How will I make sure that my team and I use the COVID-19 experience as an opportunity to transform and grow? How do we realize the uncovered potential of remote work?”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a few prominent companies announced their plans to transition to “remote-first” or hybrid operating models permanently. This means that tens of thousands of employees will have an option to continue working from home indefinitely. Companies will also be able to close some of their physical offices and redesign the remaining office space for collaboration and socialization.
We see a lot of interest in understanding the economic and societal impacts of this transition. Global Workplace Analytics and Stanford shared their estimates and point of view on this topic:
Savings for Employers
A typical employer can save an average of $11K per half-time remote worker/year. That’s from a combination of increased productivity, reduced turnover, absenteeism, and real estate costs. According to Global Workplace Analytics Telework Savings Calculators, if those employees who held telework-compatible jobs (50% of the workforce) and wanted to work at home (79% of the workforce) did so just half of the time (roughly the national average for those who do), the economic benefit would total over $700 billion a year.
Savings for Employees
A typical employee can save between $2.5-4K/year by working at home half the time. Those savings are primarily due to reduced costs for travel, parking, and food. They are net of additional energy costs and home food costs. In terms of time, a half-time telecommuter saves the equivalent of 11 workdays per year in time they would have otherwise spent commuting. Extreme commuters save more than three times that amount. These estimates assume a 75% reduction in driving on telework days.
Environmental Impact
Eliminating or reducing commuter travel is the easiest and most effective way for a company or individual to reduce their carbon footprint. If those who have a work-from-home compatible job and a desire to work remotely did so just half the time, the greenhouse gases would reduce by 54 million tons – the equivalent of taking almost 10 million cars (the entire New York State workforce) off the road for a year.
Counterurbanization
Growth of city centers are expected to stall. The largest U.S. cities have seen incredible growth since the 1980s as younger, educated Americans have flocked into revitalized downtowns. But it looks like that trend will reverse in 2020 – with a flight of economic activity out of city centers. The upside is this will be a boom for suburbs and rural areas, as many companies will be moving from high-rise offices to industrial parks with low-rise buildings.
What are the implications for teams?
Virtual work is here to stay as the economic and societal upsides are too significant to ignore. Teams need to have an open conversation about the tradeoffs of virtual ways of working and the best ways to capture the benefits while maintaining and improving connection, collaboration, and productivity.
Desire to track and monitor your team’s activity while working from home is natural and understandable. CNBC reports that worker monitoring tools see surging growth as companies adjust to remote work. Google searches for “employee monitoring” reached peak popularity in May’20:
Some employee monitoring software companies measured a 600% spike in interest from prospective customers. Many resources dedicated to employee monitoring software tools became available online. For example, this article from Medium lists the critical features of monitoring software such as employee desktop live viewer, smart time and activity control system, screen recording, and ranks ten software vendors.
As Kate Lister, President of Global Workplace Analytics, told CNBC, one of the biggest holdbacks of remote work has been trust – “Managers simply don’t trust their people to work untethered. They’re used to managing by counting butts in seats rather than by results.” The lack of trust likely drives the immediate urge to instill and expand monitoring capabilities.
But is there a way for leaders to establish trust and sustain productivity without extensive monitoring? The following statement from a McKinsey piece resonated with us:
Many leaders will now need to “show up” differently when they are interacting with some employees face-to-face and others virtually. By defining and embracing new behaviors that are observable to all, and by making space for virtual employees to engage in informal interactions, leaders can facilitate social cohesion and trust-building in their teams.
What are the implications for teams?
Leaders should be deliberate about building cohesion and trust in distributed teams. The leaders need to ask themselves: “How will I be perceived differently as a leader in this environment? How do I “show up” for my team? How do I help my team members stay connected?”
Many team leaders we talk to believe that work-from-home will have no negative impact on their team’s productivity. Their teams found that abrupt switch to remote work due to COVID-19 did not reduce their output and performance. In some cases, teams’ productivity improved as their work environment became more structured, and they were able to invest more focused uninterrupted time in their tasks.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) shared a set of findings from their research that challenge this point of view. While the research confirms that most white-collar employees made the transition to virtual work well, it reveals a critical risk for the long-term organizational health and performance. This is the risk of losing the connection that is typically created through spontaneous communication, small talk, and casual interactions.
HBR highlights three types of connections potentially undermined by all-virtual work:
(1) Integrating New Employees
As London Business School’s Dan Cable, Harvard’s Francesca Gino, and the University of North Carolina’s Bradley Staats have shown in their research, great onboarding involves allowing new employees to apply their signature strengths and express their genuine selves. This typically requires numerous in-depth interactions, and existing employees are accustomed to having those in person.
(2) Creating “Weak Ties”
This refers to shallow or peripheral relationships among members of an organization who don’t work closely with each other but have nonetheless connected over time. By providing novel information and complementary expertise, weak ties have been shown to play an important role in organizational performance, including innovation, raising or maintaining product and service quality, and attaining project milestones.
(3) Fostering Relationships
Virtual work makes it difficult for leaders to observe and foster the creation of relationships among their pools of talent that are likely to produce benefits for the organization in the future. Managing by walking around does not translate into managing by emailing around (as Ethan Burris, a McCombs School of Business professor, put it). People are still getting the work done, but the long-term relationships that once sprang from the shared experiences are undoubtedly at risk.
What are the implications for teams?
All-virtual work requires proactive strategies for deepening connections in teams. This is the only way to avoid an inevitable drop in performance in the long term. Moreover, by actively working on maintaining and expanding connections virtually, teams can improve their productivity and become happier in their job.
