My Back To Business Strategy

By Diane Banister, MD, of Intelligent Dialogue, a sales and customer service training company based in Royal Wootton Bassett that helps clients have better conversations with their customers so that they win and retain more business.

Summarise how Covid-19 has affected your business? 

All of our training was delivered face to face on clients' premises. 

At the end of March, one of the projects we were working on was a sales strategy workshop for a client where their key people were flying in from across Europe to the event in Manchester. We started to think they might not be able to fly so we would need to work via Zoom. Then as this situation unfolded we started to realise the enormity of what was happening that the timing wasn’t right to look at sales strategy anyway. At that time,  we just didn’t know how it would all play out.

I spent the first week circling in fight and flight mode. From “this won’t beat us” to “I just want to watch boxed sets and eat ice cream” (have you tried Rays Ice Cream Turkish Delight???)

Then as we started to talk to our clients we started to shape a way we could help them with the issues they were facing. We’ve been delivering bitesized live training events via Zoom or Teams for clients. 

Because you can train people in furlough, some clients have recognised there is an opportunity to develop people and help them stay connected to and engaged with their companies, we’ve been supporting them so that they can start back strong.

We’ve been getting good feedback about just how useful and powerful the sessions have been.

What has been your plan to continue?  

We’ve kept in touch with clients, really focusing on the challenges they are facing and how we can help them. 

Besides delivering training, we’ve been developing online resources, so as well as intelligentdialogue.com we also now have www.intelligentdialogue.online

How has business changed for you over the last few months? 

My personal goal this year was not to travel so much, but this wasn’t what I had in mind!

I’m now really tuned into the benefits of technology and the part it will play in our lives and our productivity going forward.

As lockdown eases what measures have you put in place to get back to business? 

We will continue to train and coach virtually. 

Most of our work involves travel and hotels and for the foreseeable future we’ll be working on line with clients, and will go back to face to face training when it’s appropriate to do that, but I can’t see that happening in the short or even medium term. 

What has been the most challenging aspect of all of this? 

The fact that things moved so quickly, we were all living the change curve. 

The thing I found most frustrating was finding information that I could trust, it all seemed to be people’s opinion, and if fear is driving opinion it’s unlikely to be reliable.

So we’ve taken it a day at a time, and worked with the facts that we have had at that time. 

What has been the most positive aspect? 

I always knew I worked with good people and great clients, but the team effort to work in this new world and deliver useful training has been immense. 

I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved, setting up learning portals, developing a new way of working, keeping client focused, and developing online training courses as part of back-to-work toolkits. 

It’s been fantastic to see people working together for everyone; 3 clients helped to install oxygen vessels into the Nightingale Hospitals, and that makes me burst with pride.

How important is this phrase to you – ‘buy local, supply local’? 

This is something I feel very strongly about, and where possible we try to buy local and support smaller businesses.

Apart from the environmental impact of moving food and goods around the world, we’ve all seen the impact a disrupted global supply chain has on goods and services.

Buy local means business rates support local services and the tax money stays locally.

One tip - there was a great documentary about Crickhowell – a town in Wales which looked at how they could avoid tax in the way that larger corporations and some holier than though singers do. It was completely eye opening, and there are shops I will not go into as a result – because they off shore their money and avoid paying their fair share of tax.

What are your top tips for other business owners at this time? 

1. Focus – where can you spend your energy where you will get most results?

2. Think carefully about how you will win business, how are your products and services relevant to what is happening now? Your sales messages from January probably won’t be the ones that will land now. Stepping into your customer’s world has always been a key part of our sales and service training – it’s absolutely crucial now.

3. And finally – a sale isn’t a sale until the money is in the bank, so do everything you can to preserve cashflow.

Do you have a particular service, product or special offer you'd like to share?

Apart from delivering training via Zoom, we’ve developed an online training course to help people sell coming out of lockdown and start back strong.

After this ‘forced pause’ from Covid-19, the landscape for business has changed and that will make sales conversations very different. The course focuses on the right mindset and skills to meet the new demands.

Sales people coming out of furlough may struggle to get their heads and hearts back into their role just when their companies need sales most. 

The reality for a lot of face to face sales people is that socially distanced selling means that they will be using the telephone and video calling, for some people this will be for the first time. 

So besides using this new technology, they will be having to switch their sales brains back on, and might also be worried about the difficult conversations that might come up and how they will sell in this new landscape.

We developed the course after being asked for help by a long-standing client who wanted to help ease the way back into work for its sales teams. I realised that many companies are facing the same issues so with their agreement we have made broadened the programme to make it relevant to a wider audience and made available through our website

We have deliberately made it affordable at £49 plus VAT per staff member. We are already getting a great deal of interest from companies.

To find out more about the programme go to www.intelligentdialogue.online or call 0845 4500988.

Your parting thoughts? 

Although we’ve all been through this experience it has been very different for all of us. Some have enjoyed spending time with their family during furlough, others have hated the loss of their routine. Some have been working long hours to pivot or keep their business going, and some have been working at the front line, helping people who needed it most. 

There are a lot of lessons here, and I certainly value the things I took for granted before.

But aren’t we pretty amazing? Haven’t we come together as communities and as a country? Haven’t there been amazing stories of generosity and courage? Sir Tom Moore usurped the instagrammers and I don’t think that’s too much of a bad thing.

For more information visit https://intelligentdialogue.com