Helping Distributors Manage and Digitize Sales Operations
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| Remi Ducrocq, KYKLO |
Remi Ducrocq, KYKLO Co-founder & CEO
From Frank: I wanted to post this article written by Remi Ducrocq for a couple of reasons. First, we know Remi and his team at KYKLO quite well and found the spirit of giving displayed in the article appropriate for our times. More importantly, KYKLO has people in Thailand, Europe, and the US. They have had at least four weeks more experience with dealing with COVID-19 than anyone else I know personally or professionally. I believe in learning from others, and I see this as an opportunity to share and learn.
I hope you gather some good pointers from this post.
A time for sharing
This is a time for sharing. As our industry works through the issues created by this global pandemic, we at KYKLO believe now is the time to share positive thoughts and best practices for our industry. This reach-out comes not as a commercial message but rather as an act of sharing.
First, we have seen our friends and clients shift their focus and struggle to maintain their presence in the market. Because of the nature of our business, they are considered “essential” and remain open to serve customers, who are also deemed essential, to the maintenance of our society. Our industry serves the companies that will be part of the solution to this crisis. Not only that, but our industry’s customers are responsible for keeping food supplies flowing, electrical infrastructures working, fresh water available from the tap, pipelines operating, and many other services required to hold together our way of life.
Using remote tools to drive internal efficiency
Back in my corporate days, I remember my email inbox was constantly overloaded by both internal and external communications. This already poses a challenge when you have everyone sitting together but becomes even more challenging when working remotely. For this reason, I would highly recommend using other tools for internal communications. Here are a few we have discovered to be life-changing.
Staying connected via internal chat
Slack is a great tool to have your team chat either through groups or on a one-on-one basis. Now that people are no longer sitting 4 feet from one another, it is key to allow people to chat quickly and easily. It also allows you to do voice and video calls internally. It has a great free plan and their pricing stays reasonable should you want more functionalities. This one is so much better than sending those emails between co-workers, it allows you to prioritize and speed communications without making a phone call.
Teams from Microsoft is also a great option.
Project management and topic-specific discussions. Trello is a visual project management tool, almost like an “online post-it”, that can help you structure projects and discussions across teams. Here is a blog post with best practices. It is best to have topic-specific discussions happen on Trello rather than Slack, otherwise, it will quickly become difficult to keep track of things.
Video conferencing. Using video conferencing is the starting point to hold remote meetings. While most people have attended or even conducted video-based meetings for customers, we have found they work great internally, too. We are social creatures and after a couple of weeks without social interaction, just seeing your co-workers periodically recharges the team feeling. We recommend asking people to switch on their cameras to make things a lot more friendly!
- Google Hangout: This is free and a great tool to use for internal calls. We use it all the time because it allows us to quickly do face-to-face meetings.
- Zoom or Gotomeeting: Those require you to pay for it, but they provide a more stable connection. We’d recommend using this for major customer calls.
Cloud hosting for documents. Sometimes you need to send large attachments. In the office environment with community storage, these can be shared with a group location. This isn’t always possible remotely and what’s worse, some of our email systems limit the size of files to the point where drawings and scans won’t go through. Box or Dropbox are great solutions for you to safely store documents on the cloud. Those can be versioned (avoid losing stuff) and can also be edited online by multiple people at the same time with Microsoft office (excel, word, etc.)
Maintaining social contact with your team.
We have found that keeping weekly routines, even with people being remote, is essential for maintaining our culture. For example, on the social side of things, we encourage casual chats not related to work or schedules. Afterhours remote “beer sessions” with peers are still fun even via video conferencing. And, it keeps spirits up and allows team members to provide moral support!
Customers are in the same situation as you.
Most are struggling to change and adapt their processes to the new environment. In this context, we recommend making it even easier for them to reach out with the use of the tools you provide them.
Video conferencing is an important tool to use with customers, too.
Salespeople have been relegated to only making calls when the situation is mission-critical. Most are busy making phone calls and emailing customers to check in on their situation. We have discovered being able to quickly migrate the call to video status makes a difference. We recommend sellers learn to set up a video session and have it ready to invite the customer to join. Another best practice is to have product information and other tools set up and ready if the session requires pictorials.
Live chat
Having a live chat on both your website and webstore allows people to reach out to your sales force and customer support. Prospects who chat are 82% more likely to convert than those who don’t. Here is an important and useful blog post on this.
Intercom is the best live chat in the market and we highly recommend it.
Customer meeting scheduling
Your team spending less time on the road means that they should have more visibility on their calendar. Calendly links up with your team calendar and allows customers to automatically book a time slot for a call. This is great for locking down a person who is sometimes hard to reach and shows respect for their time and adds professionalism to your efforts to connect.
There are obviously many more tools that could be used, but those are the ones that have made the biggest difference for us and I hope they can be beneficial to you as well.
For those with a webstore
We would like to assume everybody has a webstore. Here at KYKLO, our business is providing distributors with online branches filled with first-class enriched content, B2B features, leading technology, and more. Because of that, we have some thoughts on how to best utilize whatever presence you have. Here are some tips:
⦁ Whenever possible, refer your customer to your website. If the customer does not yet have an account, create one for them.
⦁ Instead of sending scans of catalogs, send links to the product data on your site.
⦁ Include links to the products you talk about in phone or email interactions with your customers.
⦁ Create quotations using your webstore. This allows the customer better access to information should they have a question later.
⦁ Use video conferencing to show the customer how you navigated to the product discussed.
Allow customers to place orders via the website. Generally, this cuts down on their workload and gets the products to them faster and more efficiently.
We are all in this together
Feel free to share this information with your friends and colleagues regardless of their industry. Most of the information applies to anyone struggling through this COVID-19 crisis. If anyone reading this has questions, comments or wants to explore a point, give us a call.
If you are a distributor and this managed to find its way to your desk (or computer screen), allow me to add another point. KYKLO can help you with minimal effort from your team. Now more than ever it is time to use technology to sell technology.
E-mail us to schedule a demonstration today and you’ll be well on your way, most likely before the coronavirus dust settles.
Wishing you all to stay safe and healthy from all of us at KYKLO
Editor's note: We are in no way compensated for your use of these products. Let us know how your favorite business tools to help you thrive during this pandemic.
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