Sales Management Just Got Brighter and More Resilient during Covid-19: An Abstract

Abstract

Covid-19 has made an impact on almost all aspects of our daily lives and organizations are no different. As their revenues got reduced, there has been a strong imperative to look for additional sources of new businesses, while still catering to the existing customers. The approaches for both these are vastly different and the pandemic situation accentuated this complexity. Among all the functions within an organization, the sales department has had to bear the maximum brunt during the crisis event of Covid-19. They were affected at several levels- employees lost their jobs as the revenues of organizations declined; almost all of them had to significantly strengthen their digital skills and had to cope with the new working arrangements. Facing customers with new and not very pleasant information daily led to lot of stress on sales people. Staying constantly wired internally with other departments, in terms of product modifications or revised terms and conditions for the business, was another reality. Though sales has changed from an operationally focused practice toward a strategically focused part of business strategy (Ingram et al., 2002; Jones et al., 2005; Leigh & Marshall, 2001; Storbacka et al., 2009; Williams & Plouffe, 2007), the Covid situation demanded high levels of both. This qualitative study investigates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic (waves 1 and 2) on sales management by conducting in-depth interviews of product and service personnel across three countries—namely, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and India. We draw on the sales effectiveness framework (Zoltners et al., 2008) and other well-established sales literature to analyze our findings. During Covid-19, the sales function played a crucial role and served as the “eyes, ears, and hands” of businesses: sales personnel rallied 24/7 to ensure customer referrals, customer loyalty, and customer delight. The sales process was significantly digitized and all the selling steps underwent modification. Overall, organizations became more innovative, agile, productive, and profitable during the pandemic. We recommend the use of a theoretical conceptual framework modified for sales management during Covid-19; we also list a set of 22 sub propositions derived from five major propositions, for future validation.