Jeweller - December 2021

BUSINESS
Management
The global pandemic: What buyers discovered
Selling and buying are easy, right? It’s gone on for millennia, but have we
just witnessed the greatest change ever? DAVID BROCK thinks so!
The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced
businesspeople to rethink our work and
how we interact with our customers.
We’ve seen customers reduce spending.
One of the largest adjustments we have
had to make is so-called, ’virtual selling’.
With the inability to travel or actually meet
face-to-face, we had to find a new method
for engaging our customers.
There have been some interesting results
from this. We’ve learned that reducing
travel frees us to spend more time actually
‘meeting’ with customers. We can be
more efficient, if not more productive. This
creates both opportunities and threats.
As leaders, we’ve seen challenges our staff
face in feeling connected and engaged.
Since they aren’t coming into the office,
much of the informal communication that
is fundamental to how organisations work
wasn’t happening. Therefore, we had to
invent new ways to keep staff connected
and engaged, whether more frequent
check-ins or one-on-ones, virtual cocktail
parties, or other things.
Many of these adjustments to the
workplace were probably inevitable but
accelerated because of the pandemic.
Some have been created just to survive.
We will eventually revert to some of the
things we did before COVID, abandoning
some of things that we were ‘forced’ upon
us. We will most likely continue some of
the new practices and behaviours – there’s
a lot of talk about the power combo of
face-to-face and virtual because some
organisations have discovered profound
things that re-shaped how they sell.
The pandemic and the slow emergence
from its restrictions have, perhaps, created
discussions around the future of selling.
There is increased attention to what we
might do differently, how we sell differently,
perhaps even more effectively.
But I’ve had a very uncomfortable feeling in
all these discussions.
For example, where’s the customer, other
than being the recipient of these new
The future of sales should be driven by the buyer, not the seller.
practices we are inflicting on them? What
has the customer learned and how did the
pandemic force them to change?
You see, what is often forgotten is that
customers were also forced to make
changes to their lives during, no different
to how many of their markets changed,
which in turn faced severe shifts in
demand, supply chain problems, and
challenges to their own ability to work
effectively.
New problems arose - some unique to
the pandemic and some that had always
existed but became more prominent and
observable.
Just as businesses had to create new ways
of selling and interacting with customers,
the customer had to figure out new ways
of buying. Many sellers might respond,
“Isn’t that just the mirror image of what
we are doing?” and that might lead one to
conclude, “The future of buying is virtual!”
I suspect that’s because much of the
selling paradigm is built around the
‘meeting’. We have always thought in terms
of a seller interacting directly with a buyer.
Whether it’s face-to-face, phone, social
platforms, or virtual; our paradigm has
always been around in-person meetings.
However, buyers are solving their
challenges differently from how sellers
want to solve the same issue. The
‘meeting’ is not the cornerstone to how
The pandemic
and the slow
emergence from
its restrictions
have, perhaps,
created
discussions
around the
future of selling.
they solve their buying problem, instead;
they learn through other sources – online
and offline, through colleagues and others.
In other words, the ‘meeting’ may no
longer be core to their learning/buying
process.
Sellers and marketers have been
fascinated with the application and
misapplication of technology to engage
prospects and customers, however; the
application of technology isn’t the exclusive
discovery of sellers and marketers. Buyers
are learning how to apply technology, AI/
ML to help them search, filter, and more
effectively learn.
The interesting thing is that buying hasn’t
become easier; in fact, there is a lot of
research that indicates buying has become
more difficult.
It’s never been easy to navigate a complex
buying journey. Customers often don’t
know how to buy; they struggle with
aligning the ever-increasing ‘buying team’
among many things.
And it’s getting even more difficult for
consumers! Their tools and the new digital
buying journey add greater complexity.
Whereas in the past, they may have
struggled with getting the information
they needed, now they struggle with the
abundance of high-quality information.
Consumers struggle with determining
what’s most relevant to their situation.
So while buying has changed profoundly
throughout the pandemic, the strange
disconnect is that we don’t hear buyers
talking about virtual meetings as their big
change, while that’s been the big change
in selling.
Somehow it seems the gap between how
buyers buy and how we sell is increasing,
not decreasing.
DAVID BROCK is CEO of Partners
In Excellence, a global consultancy
focused on helping organisations
engage customers more effectively. He
writes at: partnersinexcellenceblog.com
December 2021 | 53