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We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update of our ScanBizCards Lite and Premium apps for iOS, version 9.6:

– You can now connect your ScanBizCards app with Freshsales CRM, and export your contacts directly

– We’ve fixed minor issues to improve the user experience

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Tap ‘Help’ under settings on your ScanBizCards app or visit support.scanbizcards.com

Download or update the ScanBizCards Lite or Premium app here:

 

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update of our ScanBizCards Lite and Premium apps for Android, version 7.3:

– Batch Scanning: you can now scan multiple cards at the same time
– Minor bug fixes
– Performance improvements

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Tap ‘Help’ under settings on your ScanBizCards app or visit support.scanbizcards.com

Download or update the ScanBizCards Lite or Premium app here:

 

These are unprecedented times and events and shows have come to a standstill. Marketers in B2B organizations, where events and tradeshows majorly helped drive sales, are now facing challenges on how to grow their business. Studies have shown that many are re-evaluating strategies wherein budgets are being allocated toward digital marketing. In the absence of events, digital avenues promise to become the new growth-drivers. If you are also transitioning to an online strategy, then read on to know how you can use digital marketing to drive up and sustain your company’s growth.
 

Host Webinars

Events, meetings, and shows may have come to a halt, but there are still markets and buyers who need your product or service. Hence, you need to stay in touch with your prospects so that growth does not stop. One way to reach out to a large audience is through webinars. When you host a webinar:

• • Don’t try to oversell your product – now is the time when customers want reassurance and not sales pitches
  • Choose a topic of discussion that would help the audience
  • Don’t host a webinar that is too long as the attention begins to fluctuate: half an hour is enough to get your point across
  • Make sure that the clients or leads can see your face when you host the event – it will help them to connect with you better
  • Save the webinar and upload it onto your website. Also, share it on various social media channels. This will allow the audience who could not attend it, will be able to view it as well
  • Get an influencer or an important client to participate in the event as well

Be Present on Social Media

Billions across the globe use various social media channels. So, during such time, if you want to sustain your growth, it is imperative that you focus on social media to talk about your brand. Of course, you must keep in mind the times and thus act responsibly and maturely.

• • Find out what people are talking about before you create your own message
  • Write content that goes with the times, shows you as sensitive and concerned for the people, and provides accurate information
  • Don’t bombard people with excessive posts – chalk out a plan of when you will post the content
  • Use the live streaming options when you make important announcements. This will also help you to stay more engaged with the audience
  • Use paid facilities like Facebook and LinkedIn advertising to promote your brand

Content is Important

Now is the time when you should focus heavily on the content that you are creating. It should be done responsibly keeping in mind the fact that prospects are nervous and anxious. So, write content that is both informative and useful together with the fact that it gives reassurance and shows compassion. Also, you need to share your content with the audience in a timely manner. Sharing news that is old or even that which is still unverified will lead to adverse reactions. Find out:

• • The topics that are trending
  • The topics that will help your audience
  • Pay attention to the tone of your message
  • Don’t try to relate your product or service with the world news forcibly
  • Carry out keyword research to know what information is being sought

Use Push Notifications to Engage

If you have a mobile app-based user base, mobile Push notifications are a great way to engage with your audience and keep them updated on the latest developments on your service, share tips and keep your users engaged.

Search Engine Marketing

A study carried out by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research showed that B2B marketers allocated nearly 40% of their budgets to shows and events as compared to only 8% on online marketing. However, this is now changing – events stand canceled, and thus more investments are now happening on online marketing. One such area is search engine marketing. This form of brand promotion will help you to:

• • Reach the prospective customers faster
  • Lead to greater brand awareness
  • Set the ads that are geo-targeted
  • Manage your ads and implement them quickly
  • Optimize your ads such that the right audience gets targeted
  • Increase traffic
  • Make your name appear on related keywords that your competition is using
  • Review your ads and adapt to the new tone
  • Set the KPIs such that they reflect the current scenario

Overhaul Your Website

Use the time that you have now to look at your website and update it – change the way it looks and even update the content. For instance:

• • See if your webpages are sending the right messages to the audience
  • Analyze the website’s organic search rankings – use better keywords so that your ranking in search engines go up. This will get more web traffic gets directed to your site
  • Write new blog posts that are relevant to the current times

Network Professionally

You can use technology to promote yourself as a leader in your industry. For this, use professional networking platforms like LinkedIn wherein you write about industry trends, comment on posts, offer solutions to those seeking advice, and also connect with other business leaders and share ideas with them. When the audience read more about you, they will remember your brand better as well. It will also lead to more email exchanges with likeminded people. You can use the ScanBizCards app, a popular business card app, to discover contacts from these emails as it has a built-in feature called Email Signature Capture which will help you to auto-capture contacts from your emails.
 

Use VR and AR

VR and AR have a lot of untapped potentials. You must brainstorm with your team to come up with ways that you can use these to connect with your prospects more. For example, those in the construction business, where direct engagement with customers has come to a halt, can use AR to show clients the final results of the projects.
 

Summarizing

No one predicted a pandemic like this. But it has happened and it has taken the world by storm. Hence, we have no choice but to adapt to a new way of running a business. Despite a lack of events, B2B companies still have plenty of marketing tactics that they can choose from to sustain growth. So, consider the ones that will help you run your company. Adopt and adapt to the changes – after all, this situation is temporary and these tactics will help you to stay connected with your audience till normalcy returns.

With the majority of the global workforce working remotely, businesses have had to rethink and redefine their engagement and business models. It’s had a major impact on business operations, customer engagement, and sales processes. Sales has always been an interactive and customer-facing exercise. Whether it’s through personal meetings, mass events, trade shows, conferences or meetups; sales teams have relied on personal engagements to do business. But with sales reps now confined to working from home, finding new prospects and maintaining relationships with existing clients has become a challenge. It has become a matter of great concern for organizations and sales teams that rely on physical meetings or run primarily on customer relationships to find, nurture, and close leads.

But it does not spell doom for sales reps. Being able to adapt is key if businesses want to survive and thrive. With a slight shift in the mindset, you will always be able to find new and innovative ways to remotely interface with customers and reach out to new prospects. If you’re a sales leader, how do you keep your sales team motivated? During a time like this, your team needs your leadership and support. They also need you to regularly communicate with them. There are some really effective ways to do it.

Read on to know what you can do to keep your sales team motivated during times of crisis.
 

Set Measurable Goals and KPIs

Businesses understand that the current crisis majorly impacts the overall economy. McKinsey published in its study “The B2B digital inflection point: How sales have changed during COVID-19” said that sales leaders need to adjust how their organizations sell in the face of new customer habits and trying economic times as B2B sales operations going forward will look fundamentally different from what they were before the pandemic. With the sales team working from home, sales leaders must equip their sales teams with the right tools to enable them to meet their KPIs as they cannot venture out to meet customers. So, as the leader, you need to set measurable goals and KPIs for them. If you have a distributed team of SDRs, you can create structured goals, by giving them weekly KPIs. After all, routine helps us to stay focused. The routine can involve:

• • • Daily list of prospects to call.
    • A certain minimum number of calls per day.
    • Call logs, CRM updates and other metrics on how reps should report back to leads or managers with updates and with what frequency.
    • Daily stand-up meetings or weekly check-ins. You can use various video conferencing facilities like Skype or Zoom.

When teams have a sense of urgency and clearly defined goals, they will be able approach their quotas more efficiently.

 

Challenge the Team To Find New Leads

In the B2B space, leads are the fuel that your sales engine needs to keep running. Marketing & sales teams are continuously working to generate new qualified leads. However, the lockdown means there is no event or client visits happening anymore. Thus, a great way to keep your sales teams engaged and challenged is to gamify lead generation and ask your team to find new leads. Some ways this can be done are:

• • Research for leads from the existing database or CRM
  • Find potential leads from existing sources, for example, the ScanBizCards app, the best business card scanner app, has an email signature capture feature which will help to find contacts from email exchanges, leverage such opportunities
  • Network more on LinkedIn to grow your network and develop new contacts
  • Follow up with leads who have not yet responded to build a future pipeline
  • Contact leads who have not been contacted for a long time through emails, phone calls, or video calls

While they are at this, ask them to also clean up the database such that:

• • Duplicate names are removed
  • Errors in names and contact data are rectified
  • Social handles of the contacts are added
  • Labels to classify the leads are added
  • Relevant notes about each lead are written

Having a cleaned-up list will also help as then the team would know who to follow up with and where these contacts are in the sales funnel.
 

Build a Culture to Stay Connected with Customers

When it comes to engaging with customers, the sales team is habituated to being on the field – be that shows, events, or meetings. During this lockdown, all this has come to a halt. Hence, they feel restrained in maintaining engagement. As a sales leader, you can chalk out a routine and also show them new ways that they can reach out to leads.

• • • Guide them how often they should contact prospects to keep them warm.
    • Tell them of the best mediums. For instance, emails, social media, phone calls, and others.
    • Teach them how they can maintain engagement without becoming a nuisance. For example, they could ask customers how they are coping and what kind of help they need.
    • Inform them that during a time like this they need to be more sensitive and less sales-oriented.

Some of the best ways to stay engaged with customers are:

• • Live video streaming where the team can have a question-answer session to discuss their issues and understand their challenges or what they are looking for
  • Running contests and gamifying sales through incentives
  • Getting in touch with influencers who will help to spread positive news about your brand in their circle
  • Partner with other brands that are complementary to yours so that you can leverage on their brand equity

Teach New Skills

When your team members have a few extra hours a week saved from commutes , you can use this time to offer online courses to them. Picking up new skills would keep their spirits up. You could also give weekly or fortnightly topics that they would need to research on and present to the team. Both would act as stimuli to the brain, and keep your teams updated on new trends in sales. Give them sales training or refreshers, pair up BDRs or SDRs with high-performing reps. Coach them, do a few mock-call sessions, and give them content such as marketing / sales decks and other collateral to help them understand your product or pffersing’s value prop. This would also help them maintain focus on their work.
 

Engage with the Team Casually

Everything doesn’t always have to be work-related. During the pandemic when there’s anxiety in everyone’s minds, you should take time out to engage with your team casually as well.

• • You could also create contests amongst team members and offer rewards and prizes to the winners
  • Call up your team members just to talk to them casually. Speak to them about how they are managing and what challenges they are facing. Ask them if they need any kind of help
  • Create a Slack chatroom or Whatsapp group chat for light-hearted chats
  • Make lockdown videos together and share them on social media or internally
  • Organize for lunch parties, cooking times, and gaming sessions online

Don’t think that this will lead to overcommunication. During this lockdown period, it is perfectly alright to stay in touch with our team members a little more than you would have normally done.
 

Share New Company Policies

With employees working from home, often their morale fluctuates because they are anxious about job security. So be open about all information about changes in company policy. Also, as the leader, offer thoughtful gestures as a human touch goes a long way in employees feeling more encouraged. For example:

• • Send emails or hold video conferences to tell them that they will be taken care of
  • Offer free Amazon vouchers or vouchers for essential supplies like food and grocery

Now is the time when you need to keep your sales team upbeat and energized. Come up with innovative ideas. Communicate with them and encourage them to share their ideas as well. The lockdown is an unchartered territory and we are all learners in this journey. So, learn and brainstorm together to keep your teams upbeat and help them to maintain focus on their job.

When the COVID-19 pandemic was just raising its head in March, studies revealed that consumer confidence was going down. A couple of months since then, and with lockdown and social distancing having become the norm, this has taken a further nosedive. While consumers cannot do much about the general economy, they can assess their own financial situation. Hence, their spending habits have been changing and evolving. If you want to stay competitive and relevant in business during this period, it is critical that you focus on building your brand equity and keep brand recall on top of mind.

Let’s dive deeper.
 

People are Still Spending

The purchase index is not what it was in the pre-COVID-19 time. This means that consumers are no longer splurging money. However, it also does not mean that they are not spending at all. In fact, items that will make the lives of people easier during this lockdown period are being bought by consumers. Hence, this is the time when you should reach out to customers so that you can build on band recall in their minds – after all, in these uncertain times they are all seeking reassurance and certainty.

Thus, if you can portray yourself as a brand that deals in quality products or services, treats its employees well, and believes in the well being of its customers then you will be able to build brand value during this phase.
 

This Is Temporary – Build for the Future

Everything is not about the current time. You should focus on investing in your brand for the future times when markets will begin to open up and normalcy will return in the spending habits of the consumers. Some ways for you to improve your brand recall without overspending are:

• • If you are not a known brand, then instead of spending on building mass brand awareness, which can be expensive, look to collaborate or partner with other businesses in the ecosystem that customers already know of. Webinars, podcasts, blogs are great ways to do collaborations.
  • You can offer freebies but do remember to identify the right freebie that would garner appreciation during the lockdown time and are also in alignment with your brand – no sign-up or renewal charges for the next 3 months for instance.
  • Create a branded slogan or a catch phrase that brings out the current situation and also makes your brand name memorable.
  • Engage with customers in real time so that the audience remembers the experience.

This is where ScanBizCards is seeing a lot of success in its endeavour. ScanBizCards is a popular app in the B2B events community with over 2.5 million users. It is ranked one of the top 10 apps in the ‘Business’ category on the Apple App Store.

Our marketing teams are continuing to make efforts to keep brand recall on top of mind, deliver value to our users, and help our clients face the current crisis. The cancellation of B2B events has clearly had an impact on the daily active user base and net new installs of the app. On the other hand, a lot of the existing users have become more active and are spending more time on the app. Users now have time to clear their backlog of business cards, and they are using features such as human transcription service and email signature capture more actively. The engagement on the monthly newsletters, updates, and new releases has also gone up considerably. These efforts are making more and more users post reviews about their experiences using the app.

 

Reinventing the ‘Essential Category’

This is a time when consumers are focusing more on buying what is essential. This applies to both B2B and B2C scenarios. Hence, brands producing such categories of products are advertising in full swing. Groceries, hygiene products are permanent examples.

If you look at the B2B SaaS markets, platforms such as Skype and Zoom have become all the more ‘essential’ now. Many new business models are beginning to emerge from this transition. Not only this, but businesses that were earlier not producing such products, features, or goods are also shifting their focus!

SalesIntel, a B2B contact and sales intelligence platform, has made it easier to access direct mobile phone numbers. This has improved connect ratios for SDRs when people are not in the office and cell phones are the only way to speak to prospects.

Google has made the video calling feature prominent with Google Meet now. Many other companies are doing feature improvements to support new models, for example, new features to support remote work.

So, for you to stay ahead in the race, you need to advertise your brand in ways that customers recall your message and your product, service, or brand, and when they want to buy the product that you offer, they consider you.
 

Non-Essential Items May Get Forgotten About

If your product falls in the category that consumers are treating as “non-essential” in today’s setting, then you are at a risk of losing out on brand recall in the long run. These include brands operating in industries like travel, transportation, hotels, hospitality, and many others. Hence the need to continue with advertising and reaching out to customers is all the more imminent, but you have to be extremely thoughtful. So, you might have to change the way you advertise yourself – after all you would not want to appear insensitive but rather a brand that is focussed on building customer confidence.

Here are a few tips:

• • Adapt your message
  • Keep your message more subtle
  • Advertise across channels that have the most audience exposure in current times
  • Use social media to share news and updates. For example, you can tie up with resident associations to give real-time news updates
  • There is fear in the minds of people. So, non-essential brands can leverage the need for humour to get more attention

Tapping the Rising Media Consumption

Research carried out by Nielsen US showed that staying at home will result in a rise in the amount of media consumption. Hence, customers will now be viewing more ads by different brands. In such a situation, if you dont step up your campaign, you could be forgotten about. During this time, in fact, if you spend on brand promotion through advertising, not only will you be able to reach a greater number of customers at a lower cost, but you would also be able to get into their minds as being the brand who gave them assurance during uncertain times.
 

Recovery is Easier for the Strong

The first step in the marketing journey is brand awareness because it helps to get customers get familiar with you and become comfortable with your brand. Hence, even in the downtime you cannot afford to let your potential customers forget about you. Also, it has been seen that recoveries from earlier disasters has been the quickest for those businesses that had the strongest brand equity. So, you should keep working on improving the way people see you. When the pandemic is over it will help you in the following ways:

• • Capture greater market share by reaching out to the new audience that you have been building up during this time
  • If you can positively contribute to the community during this time and use that to build on your brand image, then you will be recalled in a more positive light
  • Brand awareness data will help you to analyse your audience better and you can devise new strategies and more effective future campaigns based on such data

Summarizing

Sales are bound to experience a slowdown. So, instead of focusing all your attention on how to sell more, you should also invest in building your brand’s image as it will give you great dividends once normalcy is restored. However, this is not an easy call to take because you would be reassessing your marketing budgets as well. Do remember this, globally, businesses are adjusting to a huge behavioral change and so how you communicate with your customers – existing and prospective – will play a crucial role in how you fare in the long run.

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you. Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find in the latest update of our Android app, version 7.2.1:

– Performance improvement of business cards backup and restore — you can now backup and restore scanned business cards on your Google Drive faster and seamlessly.

– Minor bug fixes

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Tap ‘Help’ under settings on your ScanBizCards app or visit support.scanbizcards.com

 

Most organizations are currently impacted due to quarantines, shutdowns and work from home rules. All this has already caused an immense loss in revenues. The uncertainty about when normalcy would resort is getting people a little restless now – but don’t give up as there’s always a silver lining on the horizon. Rather, use this downtime as an opportunity to do activities that you otherwise don’t get time for.

If you’re in the sales or marketing function, one of the most important tasks that always gets put on the back burner is organizing your leads in the CRM. It’s even more likely at a time like this that you’ll lose track of your leads and contacts.

This downtime is ideal to organize your leads so that you can go back to forgotten or left-open opportunities, especially when the inflow of leads can be limited. And also to have your leads scored and organized for when normalcy resumes – you will know exactly who to reach out to.

Here are a few tips.

Capture Your Business Cards Leads

There is likely to be a stack of business cards leads from the meetings, events and shows that your teams have attended in the recent past. This is a great time to tap all those potential opportunities and get all the contact details from business cards leads into a centralized CRM.

This can be a tedious task if you do it manually. But instead of manually entering the data into a spreadsheet or a CRM, use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards. This app will scan the contact information on the cards and let you export scanned cards to a CSV file or directly export to various CRMs or email marketing systems.

Add Tags to Contacts

When your sales team meets prospects, not only are business cards exchanged but meaningful conversations are also held. During this time, the team must have taken down notes about the prospective leads. Use this downtime to add these notes to the contact database that you have created. The business card app ScanBizCards will help you to do this work quickly and easily. A lot of interesting analysis can be done from such notes. For example, you can find out:

• • Which product features are being most appreciated
  • Which media source is working for your brand promotion the most
  • Which is the most common issue that customers are talking about
  • Create ‘client folders’ or tag existing customers. This will help you when the renewal time comes
  • Nudge “stale” opportunities. You can do this by reviewing when the last meeting was held and what was the outcome of it. If you have been following up with them for a long time but have not made any progress, these should get tagged. There is no need to give up on these leads without a final try. With more time on your side now, you can split your BDR teams into groups. While one takes care of the existing customers, the other group can be assigned the job of cold calling the ‘dormant’ group and try to nudge them.

You can use this downtime to use this information to work on your future marketing strategy.

Email Signature Capture

Just because meeting people is now no longer happening, it does not mean that you cannot generate new leads. Emails can be used to get new leads. You can use the ScanBizCards app for this. It has an Email Signature Capture feature which will help you to find hidden contacts from your email exchanges and add them to the database. Currently, the app supports popular email providers e.g., Microsoft, Exchange, and Google. Once your account is connected the app will scan any available emails from the past 30 days, and also new ones that you receive, to look for available contacts in email signatures.

Organize your CRM

Having tons of leads will not give you tons of conversions. Often low quality leads clog the sales funnel and adversely affect the sales cycle. So it is important that you organize your CRM. This can be done in the following ways:

• • You might find that CRM has fields that have become redundant. Remove all fields that you don’t need and make it clutter-free
  • Fix the page layout so that you can see the critical information on one page and minimal page navigation is required
  • Schedule training sessions so that all who are using the CRM know how to optimally use the software
  • Remove duplicate data, or data that is incorrect due to errors in typing or invalid (changed phone numbers)

Get in Touch With Prospects

While you are organizing your leads, use this time to also get in touch with the ones who are on the list but you have never had the chance to follow-up with – call them! While you speak with them, find out from where they got to know about you as this will help you to determine what form of advertising is working for you, which form of events trigger the best leads for you, which geography your audience mostly live in, and others. Once you have all this content in place, it will help you to nurture these new prospects better and move them slowly towards a conversion.

Communicate with the Sales Team

It is not just about organizing your leads, but also about communicating with the sales team how to work efficiently. Sometimes the team does not follow up with a contact and things fall through the cracks. This can happen because:

• • The sales reps are already following up with a long list and some top of the funnel leads are forgotten or
  • The contact information is not made available in a timely manner, by the time it’s found, the prospect is no longer interested

The team needs to be told how important it is to follow-up with a new contact without any delay and to put forth a process by which this would get streamlined.

Identify New Partnership Opportunities

When you organize your leads, it is possible that you might find new business opportunities through ways other than pure sales. You can find potential businesses that you can partner with. For example, if you have a marketing system, such as a CRM or mobile app, you can partner with marketing agencies, or other APIs and software vendors to deliver integrated solutions to clients. When you do this, you share each other’s customers, thereby helping to generate new prospects that will help your business to grow.

Final Thoughts

Simply having a huge contact database is not enough. The leads need to be categorized so that the sales team will know who to follow up with on priority, where each contact is in the sales funnel, and also not miss out on any prospect. As the current pandemic still looms over our heads, you should use these tips and the time you have to organize your leads. It can definitely win you new customers, and also help you to make better decisions when it comes to devising a future strategy to grow your business.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken over the world – we now sit isolated in our homes. Keeping both mentally and physically healthy is of paramount importance as these are uncertain times when one can easily feel restless and stressed. It’s important to stay informed and connected to feel safe. Lifestyle changes are now unavoidable.

This is why technology has begun to play such a significant role in the lives of people in recent months. Read on to know how tech can help you to stay safe amidst this situation.

Connecting People – For Work and Personal Needs

With the need for social distancing, technology is playing a key role in keeping people connected. Video calls using Skype and FaceTime, for instance, which was always a great way to communicate, is now the default way.

• • In stressful times, keeping a fresh mind is important. Staying connected with others helps us to stay calm and feel connected.
  • Those who are in self-quarantine and alone at their homes, need to reach out to people so that others are aware that you are doing fine.
  • The elderly need to stay connected so that in case of an emergency, they can be helped.
  • Businesses are dependent entirely on Skype and Zoom to keep their teams productive and serve their customers.

In fact, many healthcare service providers and doctors are providing telemedicine services so that those seeking medical attention can reach out easily.

Work from Home

Yes, many businesses have suffered a huge setback. The aviation or the hotel industry for example have come to a near standstill. But there are other industries, like software and IT, where work from home has begun to be implemented on a wide scale. Various online meeting software are being used to ensure that businesses keep running while employees work from home. Even the education sector has begun to roll out new learning platforms. With this students can continue to learn using live-streamed lectures.

Improving Productivity

With countries under lock-down and almost the entire workforce around the world currently working from home, productivity becomes a major challenge Certain industries such as SaaS have an advantage in that with the right tools, they can manage their tasks working from home with the same level of productivity.

Here are a few examples:

• • Sales and marketing teams can use tools such as Salesforce to manage their leads, funnels, activity logs, revenue goals and so on. Apps such as ScanBizCards help you stay productive managing leads and contacts
  • Software development teams use tools like Jira and Slack to keep track of work, software release etc.
  • LinkedIn helps you stay informed and connected with other businesses and professionals

Helping With Access to Essential Items

People can comfortably stay in home confinement only if they have easy access to the essential items – the most important during this time being food and medicines. For this, yet again, tech is helping. For example, as it is no longer safe to go grocery shopping at stores, many ecommerce businesses like Amazon Fresh and Farmbox Direct are offering home delivery services. With the help of e-wallets payments for these deliveries is also now no longer a hassle. There are also psychological counselling services that are now available online. Most of these are free and are providing people with counselling to help them deal with their stress and fear.

Helping to Stay Healthy

Let us admit it – if we stay cooped up for so long, with no exercise of activity, our health will suffer. However, there is no way that we can go out to the gardens or gyms to exercise. Hence, finding ways to keep ourselves fit at home is needed. Here is where access to technology will help. For example, there are fitness studios that are live-streaming exercise sessions and there are plenty of workout links available on Youtube as well.

Location Tracking of Infected People

The governments of nations like South Korea, China, and Taiwan have been tracking people with the help of location information given by them through their phones. This has played a crucial role in reaching them to know if they have been infected or not and providing them immediate treatment. Also, countries like Germany and Italy have been using location tracking to identify places where group gatherings are occurring as this is now no longer permissible. In the UK recently an app was launched that helped people to report their symptoms. This tracker has helped to identify high-risk areas.

Sharing News and Alerting People

When the virus began spreading, it also began to spread a lot of false information – as WHO termed it, an ‘infodemic’ was beginning. This is when tech yet again saved the day. Experts, universities, and organizations came in to share the correct information and encourage people to take the right measures to protect themselves.

Artificial Intelligence has also helped people in providing information on public health. For example, the Canadian company, BlueDot, uses AI to scan 100,000 online articles in 65 different languages every day to find information on public health. This, in fact, helped to alert clients about the virus threat even before WHO had!

Use of Robots at Hospitals

In China and Singapore robots have been used in quarantine facilities to take the temperature of patients, give them food and medicine, and even to clean the facilities. This has spared healthcare workers from getting exposed to the virus. In some parts of China drones fitted with cameras and loudspeakers have also been used to tell people to leave the streets and to return to their homes.

Drones Delivering the Essentials

In some countries drones have been assembled that are helping to supply essentials like food and medicine to people who are now restricted at their houses. In fact, e-commerce sites like Amazon, Domino’s Pizza, and Walmart, have begun to test if they can use drones to reduce their delivery costs. In the USA, however, safety concerns have constrained the use of drones. Drones help to deliver supplies quickly and don’t have the risk of spreading infections. So, maybe rules in the US would see some relaxation in the days to come.

Entertainment

With everyone now at home, and no outdoor entertainment possible, people have begun to turn to the Internet for entertainment options. Hence, tech is now playing an important part to keep people entertained. For example:

• • Live Streaming of programs
  • Chatting with family
  • Holding group meetings to discuss favorite books
  • Playing video games
  • Learning a new hobby
  • Downloading new food recipes
  • Curating playlists of the most-loved songs

Technology is now everywhere – without it no business can run, and now without it, we can no longer feel safe and stress free. A time will come when the virus threat will end and we will all get back to the earlier routine. Let us not forget then how tech helped us to stay safe amidst a pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken over the world. With social distancing having become the need of the hour, almost all events have been canceled, postponed, or are being conducted online. If you operate in the B2B space like us, I am sure you’re also looking forward to the end of this outbreak so we can return to our normal lives and focus on growing our business. We wanted to share our perspective on the current lock-down situation and give some of our thoughts on what you can do at a time like this.

Remain Optimistic

Right now the only thing one knows with certainty is that the virus is still spreading and one cannot really yet say how many more days or months the world will continue to be in this standstill mode. That said, when one country imposed a lockdown, many others followed soon after. How different countries deal with lockdowns will depend on a lot of factors prevalent in those countries. In the meantime, innovation is what is keeping businesses running. So, if you are in the B2B space and you are unable to host or participate in events, there are ways that you can come up with to keep the business running. First and foremost, stay positive yourself because only then will the mind feel spirited enough to be able to think of new ways to reach out to the customers.

Look Beyond Events to Connect with Customers

If you operate in a space where you significantly depend on events to generate your leads, then all the cancellations will have hit you adversely. However, this does not mean that you need to shut shop. There are other ways to reach out to prospective customers. A study conducted by EE GlobalSpec found that 28% of marketers operating the B2B space have begun to reinvest their trade show budget into digital avenues in their marketing outreach initiatives. Some of the methods being used are:

Blogging

Now is the time to spend more on blogging where you can publish content that spread optimism among customers. Also, research has shown that traffic is increasing on financial and news-oriented websites. So, if you’re in these verticals, these are the kinds of features that you should be writing now.

Twitter

Amongst all the social media sites, Twitter is the one that is performing the best in terms of audience engagement. So, during this time, you should use trending hashtags to reach out to people to create a base of loyal followers. This group will help you with conversions when you are back in business after all restrictions have been lifted.

Emails

Stop sending emails that focus on sales campaigns but rather focus on concern towards the customer. For example, tell them of ways to prevent the virus from spreading and what you are doing to contribute to those who have been affected.

Tweak Your Creative Content Accordingly

Just finding new ways to reach out to customers is not enough. You must also review your existing creative content because it might contain videos and images that might not be relevant today. For example, if you have advertisements that show crowds at trade shows, handshakes, high fives, and others, these can trigger negativity amongst the audience and so you need to bring these down and introduce new ones keeping in mind the current perspective.

Images of people hugging at gatherings is usually a good marketing idea, but in current times where social distancing is critical, it might not go down well

Conforming to the needs of the current times, businesses should show their social responsibility by promoting safety and well-being of the community

Prioritize Listening to Customers

In these days of COVID-19, the need of the customer is evolving each day and so it is very important to listen to what the customer really wants. For this you can monitor what people are talking about on social media channels like Facebook and LInkedin. You should also have a team who speak to your existing stakeholders to know what the emerging trends and wants are.

Modify Your Webstore

A lot of businesses use B2B events as a key platform for branding and events are often their main lead-gen source. With people in a lockdown mode, if you are in a B2B industry where you operate through multi stores in different geographies, it is likely that most of these stores won’t be seeing a huge footfall anymore. Hence, now is the time to focus on webstores.

Launch a Webstore

If you have already been operating a webstore, you should spruce it up so as to make the customer experience a more streamlined one. If, however, you don’t have a website, then now is the time when you should launch one.

Returns

During this pandemic, you will find that demands are fluctuating and changing. Hence, there is a possibility that what customers buy or place an order for, they might want to return or exchange. Hence, your website should be such that these returns can be made easily and quickly. Your return policies should also be so devised that they don’t penalise the customers in case they want to return the products.

Accuracy of Data

Design your webstore such that only relevant information is displayed. Also keep all your data up to date in real-time. For example, if you are ‘out of stock’ for a particular product or have discontinued a service, then you should update that so that your customers don’t feel harassed.

Support Your Customer

When times are uncertain and customers are anxious, you should do that extra bit to keep them pacified.

• • Customers living in geographies that have been hit the worst should be given additional benefits like prioritising delivery of stock to them
  • Treat your loyal customers specially rather than focussing on growing your customer base now. So, if you are running low on a certain product, deliver it to your loyal customer base.
  • Extend the dates by when invoices need to be paid if you find that some customers are finding it difficult to make the payment by the due date.
  • Implement services like additional discounts, free delivery, and others so as to make the customer experience a better one.

Don’t Hard Sell Your Product

If you are a B2B that is selling a product or services that are not regarded by buyers as being essential at a time like this, then you are bound to see a dip in your sales. Yet, you should not try to hard-sell your product as else you will be considered to be insensitive. This can turn off prospective buyers who are already dealing with many hard decisions of what to purchase and what not to. Instead, now is the time when you should be more compassionate and offer easier and cheaper deals. You must also get into a consultative mode where you help customers to make the right decision. While this might not bring in the revenues for you immediately, it will help you to build new relationships that will be more loyal to you. This will benefit you once things return to normal.

Use Dashboards to Monitor Performance

Yes, you are in the B2B space and your sales are dipping. However, if you are a global brand with a presence in many countries, it is likely that your sales are not dipping equally everywhere. Also, if you offer more than one product or service, it could also be that not all services are dipping equally. So as to keep track of all these changes and fluctuations you must use a dashboard. When you monitor your performance using a dashboard, you will know where and with products you can currently focus on so as to stay afloat in the business.

Final Thoughts

In this challenging time of changing needs, while you might not be hosting or attending events, you will still be able to engage with your customers. All you need to do is to change your strategy a little and show empathy towards your customers.