How to grow your B2B sales during lockdown

When the first lockdown hit in March many businesses first instinct was to hunker down and forget about finding new prospects, which in turn could be cultivated into new customers that would create business growth.

All of a sudden it seemed everything had changed.

Panic hit the markets, offices became empty spaces and schools, shops, restaurants, and bars closed.

But what happened to those businesses that did not stop looking for new business?

SoPro, the UK’s leading social prospecting business, can reveal all. Data from the first two lockdowns reveals what happened to businesses that kept up lead generation efforts.

History lessons

The severe restrictions and climate of fear and instability have certainly created volatility and recession signals. The effects of these, however, are concentrated much more heavily in some sectors than others.

But history has already taught us time and time again that even the most severe recessions do not preclude business growth.

Here are just two examples from many;

1929

During the Great Depression Kellogg’s emerged as a market leading cereal brand by doubling up on its ad spend to achieve 30% revenue growth.

1981

Analysis has revealed that during this prolonged, severe economic downturn, companies that maintained or increased advertising spend achieved 256% higher sales than those that did not.

Lockdown lessons

And so, to our current lockdown.

Are there still new business opportunities out there and should you be actively looking for them?

The answer is a resounding yes – and we have the data from our own prospecting during the first national lockdown to prove it.

Lockdown requires agile prospecting

With certain sectors hit hardest by lockdown your business needs to pivot to grow. This may be pivoting your offer and/or pivoting the sectors you reach out to.

Lockdown can mean more (not less) leads

Now, some businesses will of course not be able to drum up new business at this time. But for those still able to conduct business but finding times tough, the data reveals positive news.

If we look at SoPro’s own new business data, far from decimating new business opportunities, the first lockdown produced more leads than our email prospecting activity in September to November 2019.

And, what’s more, one of prospecting’s great strengths even before lockdown was its scalability. Our own data, and that of over businesses we handle prospecting campaigns for, found that this scalability continued through the spring lockdown.

If you have more capacity for new clients, increasing you outreach will, in turn, still create more leads. From May onwards we started to prospect to more businesses, and our leads continued to grow accordingly.

Lockdown means a longer time to reach a deal

In normal periods, it takes our sales team 37 days to close a deal on average. But during lockdown, and its ensuing uncertainty, the time to close doubled to just over 72 days.

So, it’s more important than in ‘normal’ circumstances to hold your nerve.

Leads are still readily available and can be scaled up – but the sales process will take longer to complete, as businesses carefully weigh every decision and every penny spent.

Lockdown opportunities yield better (not worse) conversion rates

Here’s the real bonus.

We found that during lockdown our lead conversion rate was 9.5%.

Amazingly that is 22% higher than the preceding three months (where it was 7.8%) and following months (where it was 8.1%).

Lockdown conclusions

If you are still able to conduct business but are struggling to find leads and close sales, the conclusion is clear: prospecting can find the demand where it exists.

It requires patience, as leads can take longer to close, and some repositioning. Here are three ways we’ve optimised prospecting results for our clients and ourselves:

1. Adjust which sectors to target to those still needing your products/services.
2. Adjust your proposition to directly meet the changed demand scenarios.
3. Adjust your messaging to reflect the relevance of your proposition within each sector.

For more support generating new leads in this pandemic visit our Covid-19 B2B resource centre.