Six Thoughts on How to Adapt to the "New Normal"

 As the Coronavirus continues to challenge the economies across the world, business leaders will be facing some of the biggest challenges of their careers. You may be a CEO, leading the overall direction of a company, or maybe a CRO responsible for the growth and retention of your client base, or a department leader that suddenly finds the world you know upside down. You are now facing challenges that were surely not in the "training manual", namely, how to withstand the impact of so many unprecedented challenges ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Your goal now is to help get your company back to a path of normalcy, even if it is a "new normal." 

Our extended team took a moment of reflection, and we sat down to discuss amongst ourselves some of the best practices that all leaders need to be implementing as we continue into these uncharted times. We created this list to share with you to add to the compendium of other solid advice we are reading from peers in business. Here are six of our best thoughts:

Effective Communication 

Build out a communication plan that not only supports employees, but that keeps you connected to the broader ecosystem around your brand. Think through the "Value Chain of the Customer" and all the points you need to stay connected with to keep your business relevant and moving forward. Collaborate with your partner network on joint communication opportunities.

Flexibility 

In our SaaS and Cloud base world, many of the "business as usual" functions can continue with a little bit of creativity. Face-to-face client interactions, conferences, and team meetings can move forward through online and collaboration tools. Learn to master remote communications and not let it become a barrier to advancing your initiatives forward.

Keep Selling  

Adapt and shift your sales strategy. Understand that your customers are dealing with the same challenges as you are. How can your solution help them? Maybe your old message of how “they hit their growth targets this quarter” is not going to be effective, so develop new thoughts on how you can help your clients survive and thrive.

Leverage Partnerships

You don't have to do it alone. As partner professionals, we advocate this maxim in the best of times, but in the worst of times, they become even more critical. Your partnership network becomes very important with limitations of travel, canceled conferences, and the inability to hold face-to-face meetings to build relationships with end customers. This pause is a great time to conduct Account & Relationship Mapping exercises with partners to identify joint opportunities, identifying campaigns and thought leadership activities that could advance both of your efforts in the market. 

Stay Strategic, Plan for the Long Term

Today's reality is that your sales cycles will slow down, and your pipeline may stall. Don't panic; use this time to stay strategic and be prepared for when the business starts to rebound. From a partnership perspective, this is a great time to build a strategy or grow your current one. The likelihood is that both you and your partners have time and the investment will pay dividends.

Rekindle Relationships and Also Know It's Okay To Be A Little Silly

A sense of lighthearted humanity is one of the greatest things we have seen coming from this move to a remote workforce. The stories we have seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere of silly hat video calls, fun dress code themes for each day, the sharing of pictures of remote desks on Slack are humorous but they really highlight an important fact: your employees are human beings trying to adapt to a new, unusual, and uncomfortable situation. Embrace it. It's natural. In the next week or two, your teams will become more comfortable with working remotely. This time of upheaval is not only a great time to get to know the human side of your employees but a great time to rekindle relationships with your outside contacts, like partners or your network. Everyone who can is working from home and may want more human interaction. Remote work can be lonely and disconcerting. In this moment of discomfort, it's a great time to build more personalized relationships.   

We hope some of these thoughts help. In a crisis, there is opportunity to grow and learn. Your leadership skills will help bring stability to your organization, your customers, your ecosystem, and the world at large. As a leader, this is your moment to shine!