As a sales leader, you always want to be prepared. So what should leaders be focused on now in order to be prepared for the rebound when the time comes?

Learn what Liz Ritzcovan, has to say in this clip.

Carole Mahoney:
So we have all this extra time now, right? Some of us are cooking more, I know I am! But as a sales leader, what is it that we should be focused on now to be ready for when that rebound happens? Like you talked about with the Pops that we're planning for next year now. A lot of us are looking at the summertime maybe it'll come back, maybe Q3.

What are some of the things that you're doing now with your teams and encourage others to do to be ready for that bounce back?

Liz Ritzcovan:
Yeah, absolutely. So hyper-focused on this. It's really top of mind. So what's been really interesting is with our business in customer journey, hijacking prevention, because everyone is online, the way that ad injections or the disruption from creating a fluid customer journey is happening, it is being more and more disruptive because more people are downloading extensions, trying to find Wi-Fi wherever they can just so they can talk to loved ones and have conversations.

So I decided I feel like as we get towards the fourth quarter, which we're on a calendar year, so I would call it that holiday time, I really feel like, and I hope, knock on wood, that we are truly back to whatever that normal is. Consumers are spending, doors are opening. We are back to a better state of getting our world back to the usual notion of shopping in brick and mortar.

Now, I don't know what that's going to look like yet, but I feel like what we've seen and what we're seeing happening, it's the time to get our house in order. So I've been spending a tremendous amount of time getting back to basics. And what do I mean by that? I mean, let's cleanse and let's purge. And by the way, I'm doing it professionally. I've also been doing it personally because I have time to clean closets and my husband just put in a garden for my daughter. So that's happening.

But professionally it's time to start thinking about, what are we going to do differently? And so I'll give you an example. As a few of the sellers have been out talking to customers, whether existing customers or new customers, the dialogue has changed, actually. Customers there, it's less about, "no, no, I get what you do. It's more about, but can you help me solve this? I need to look better at customer acquisition. I need to talk strategically."

So now we're working on real-time training around the consultative approach to really have an open dialogue with our customers about what's happening with their business and how we can help them, whether it's marketing spin, what creative looks like. I mean, all of that kind of affects what consumers are seeing online and making that a fluid experience, so they don't get lost.

We're also thinking about 2021. So once we start hiring people, once we start doing these things and onboarding people, how could that look better? What could that experience look like differently? Also, when you think about planning for that, when do we need to get butts in seats, excuse the term, but people in-house to be ramped and productive in order to be able to give them a quota as we go into 2021. So those are things let's train, let's coach.

We do have career laddering in place, which again, it goes back to what I said earlier, the employee is the most important person. But let's continue that theme and figure out how we can help people grow their careers and challenge them better and just train them. And so we're spending some time looking at those playbooks and how we can refine that as we go into the next year.

Carole Mahoney:
Absolutely. And it's a lot of what I'm hearing from CEOs and CROs of what they need to be doing right now. I love the analogy that you used of cleaning your own house. I am definitely cleaning out closets as well, like looking for ways for things to be more efficient because that's something we can control, right?

We can't necessarily control when the government will decide to reopen things. We can't necessarily control anything else, but we can control our reaction to it, how we handle it. Training and coaching and developing is something that's important all the time, just like relationship building is. But it becomes even more paramount now when you're trying to figure out, all right, who on our team's going to actually be able to sell our way through this? What training and support do they need? Are they able to sell consultatively? How viable is our pipeline?

I think what's going to happen, and this is just my two cent prediction, is that we're going to see a lot more focus on the people development of things versus the technology side of things. Because I think in the past that we've tried to figure out a way to get technology to replace people because we had a people shortage. That's not necessarily the case now. And I think now even more so that buyers want someone who can consult with them, can advise them, can guide them through to help them to make decisions because they know that they need to do something. They just don't know what yet. And they don't know where to turn for help.

So kudos to you for seeing that beforehand. I think a lot of leaders are starting to understand that it is our people that matter. They're the ones that are going to make the difference here.

Liz Ritzcovan:
Yeah. Even the language you use, the way you can phrase a sentence or a conversation with another human being, really analyzing that and helping. And again, I don't want to talk track people. I want them to use their own language and their own voice, but if you can really help them think through how they would want to be talked to, it really does help sort of the inside looking out, and outside looking in perspective.

Carole Mahoney:
Yeah, absolutely.

Stay tuned to learn more from this interview!
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