COVID-19 proved to the world the importance of being adaptable, and ready to react quickly to change. For businesses, this meant pivoting quickly to new business models, new ways of working, and new channels through which to engage their customers.

In Singapore, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are expected to be the biggest casualties, despite job support schemes rolled out by the government to tide over this teething transition. However, there is a silver lining. While small businesses lack the deep pockets of their enterprise competitors, they are also often more nimble, more agile, and more able to quickly shift business priorities.

Businesses are now waking up in a digitally transformed world awash with new unknowns – and opportunities. Here are four key ways businesses can rewrite their go-to-market strategies to ride this wave of change.

Reaching outsiders through inside selling

Inside selling is not new. Most businesses are likely supported by some form of inside sales, whether they’ve termed it this way or not. Simply put, inside selling refers to the remote sales of products and services via remote channels, as opposed to outside selling, which hinges on meeting prospects physically.

With face to face meetings off the table, the pandemic has turned outside sales teams into inside sales teams overnight. To successfully support an inside sales model, SMEs can leverage user-friendly customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps their salespeople to get started quickly, while providing them with a centralised view of customer data.

This way, different team members have the same understanding of what the customer needs, without having to put their prospects through repeated questioning processes. This also enables them to deliver a personalised experience to prospects, across every part of the customer journey.

This transition could actually swing in the favour of SMEs who can strategically redistribute their resources to better attend to their customers:

Optimising human resources: 85 per cent of consumers now conduct online research before making a purchase decision. This means salespeople’s time is better spent building relationships and providing prospects with helpful information online rather than focusing on running in-person demos. For resource-scarce SMEs, the shift to inside selling represents tremendous cost and time saving as customer relations and sales are now managed online.
Amplifying reach and boosting engagement: Tools like live chat, 1:1 asynchronous video, and sequences — which allow sellers to schedule personalised follow-up emails to prospects – enable salespeople to adapt how they sell to the way prospects want to buy and allow them to increase their productivity without losing the personal connection. In fact, inside sales teams make 43 per cent more phone calls, leave 10 per cent more voicemails, and send nine per cent more emails than organisations predominantly made up of outside sales people.

From offline to online

As many offline channels have gone quiet during the pandemic, the online engagement between consumers and companies has reached record heights. According to HubSpot data, website site traffic in Singapore increased by 17 per cent from Q1 to Q2, and marketing email open rates were 14 per cent above pre-COVID-19 levels by the beginning of Q3.

Also Read: Surviving COVID-19: How to adapt your digital marketing strategy amidst a global crisis

This underscores the importance of establishing a strong online presence, supported by a fully online marketing strategy. SMEs can track online performance metrics – such as webpage traffic, email open rates, social media engagement, and even digital ad ROI – to gain deep insights on the most effective customer engagement channels.

This helps them to optimise budget spend and finetune their strategies to keep pace with rapid shifts in consumer behaviour in a matter of hours. This agility is critical for SMEs so they can quickly redeploy resources, adjust the tone of their messaging to reflect the times and communicate important information to their audiences in a timely manner.

Of course, ‘going online’ is not just about maintaining a website and as many social channels as you can. There is an extremely wide array of tools that perform different functions online, from chatbots to social scheduling tools to CRM software, but building a positive online customer journey isn’t just about utilising as many tools as you can. In fact, it is quite often the opposite.

It entails envisioning the online experience from start to finish, then picking out the solutions you need in-house to build that vision. Where the online journey is concerned, less can often be more.

Self-service is sometimes the best customer service

When businesses empower customers to self-serve, everyone wins – especially SMEs that are already running a tight ship. In fact, it can be an effective differentiator. HubSpot’s recent State of Service report found that 91 per cent of service agents acknowledged the importance of a great knowledge base optimised for search, yet only 40 per cent of companies currently have one.

There’s an immediate way for companies to set themselves apart from the competition here, just by providing information about their own products and services in a helpful manner.

On the other hand, tools like automated chat help free up customer service staff to work on more complex customer issues while customers find quicker solutions to their problems compared to emailing or calling a helpline. In fact, the volume of customer-initiated chat interactions has increased by 31 per cent during the pandemic, and self-service options like this will go from being a “nice to have” to a “must-have” in the digitally transformed world.

Furthermore, a chatbot isn’t just an interactive FAQ for your website. When integrated with other systems, it can help businesses manage the increased volume of queries, route leads to the right sales teams, and automates meeting bookings. All of this allows your sales and service teams to do more at the same time while providing greater customer satisfaction.

Less is more with your toolkit

As SMEs accelerate their digital transformation, many are rapidly adopting a vast array of new technologies and powerful online tools. However, there are potential downsides to consider. They could run the risk of taking on a host of disparate tools that don’t work well together, leaving them with a bloated tech stack that creates data silos, increases administrative work, and makes it difficult for teams to stay aligned.

Also Read: Customer is not always the king, says Tokopedia’s customer engagement expert

These processes and cost inefficiencies could critically deplete an SME’s resource which could be used to improve customer experience.

SMEs can shed their tech debt by constructing a lean suite of tools that suits their unique needs while enabling them to move agilely in the post-pandemic era. They should select a system that gives all internal teams access to a single source of truth on customer data.

Without this, customer-facing staff will be working off different information, making it monumentally difficult to deliver the type of seamless, contextual experience that customers now expect. Additionally, they should also factor the ease of integrating additional tools with their platform of choice.

Rewriting the memory of 2020

The go-to-market playbook for this era will be one made up of inside selling, online marketing, and self-service options for customers, powered by a lean tech stack that enables them to keep pace with customer expectations. SMEs that embrace these new strategies are the ones most likely to navigate these times with success and thrive in the post-pandemic world.

This way, 2020 will be remembered not for the economic stagnation that took hold, but rather for the rapid progress that took flight.

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