The Business Impact of COVID 19
Add these four Internet techniques to your list of ways to adapt to the impact COVID-19 has on your business and how you can successfully sell in the new minimal contact economy.
1) Enable A Secure Online Payment Option
Consumers don’t want to touch cash, and they don’t want to touch checks and envelopes. Perhaps you previously rejected online payments due to higher fees, but now is the time to rethink that. Taking payments online is a safe way to get money faster to help with your cash flow. COVID-19 will not only have a quiet business impact on sales but also on Accounts Receivable (A/R), so reducing friction points in payments helps.
PayPal gives you several options to accept online payment requiring no technology implementation on your part. Simply build a payment page on your website using your existing merchant gateway. Depending on how your website is built, adding an online payment option like PayPal, Stripe, or Square can cost as little as $1,500 resulting. With less friction in the buying experience, your online payment system results in less A/R and more sales.
2) Convert Key Sales Pieces into Website Pages
Your Zoom sales meeting follow-up should include links to key selling pages on your website, not as attachments to emails. Why? Because you want your prospects to see the rest of what your company can do. You have the option of making these pages semi-private by not adding them to your website navigation, allowing prospects only to see these pages when you send them the direct link.
If you are having less face-to-face interaction with prospects as a result of COVID-19, use your website to show them who you are. Your website will become the way more people experience your company and your brand in a minimal contact sales environment
3) Add Chat to Your Website
Less face-to-face selling means more virtual selling. Before you can convince prospects to participate in a Zoom sales meeting, they’ll need some basic questions answered first. Online chat is an efficient way for sales prospects to get questions answered without costing too much time.
Here’s the challenge though – make sure you have the staff for it. An unanswered chat is worse than an unanswered phone call. Customers will ensure a couple of rings waiting for you to answer the phone but they won’t wait nearly that long for you to answer a chat.
4) Add a Company Intranet
If you have more employees working remotely, a company Intranet is an easy to way post all of the material you used to post in your physical space such as events, staff directories, important employee forms and policies, and processes.
In its simplest form, an Intranet is merely a website that only your employees can see.
Need help in making sure you are ready for the impact COVID 19 will have on your business? Talk to one of our specialists. We’re helping companies all across the country adapt to a new way of selling and prospecting.
