Q: How have sales leaders and processes changed in the wake of the pandemic?

A: The principles of professional relationship selling remain at the forefront, but in some ways our behavior around those processes has changed. Clearly, sales professionals who have previously been reliant on face-to-face meetings have had to modify and redeploy their energies. That's been a difficult pivot.

Building trust never goes away; it is the key to sales success. So if face-to-face interactions have been eliminated in your industry by COVID-19 protocols, that has been a showstopper from the get-go. Digital communications and Zoom have necessarily replaced those handshake meetings. Conventional wisdom is being challenged: How should salespeople spend their time? Does a structured "here's the playbook" still work? Is there still value in specialized sales programs?

Sales professionals must be sensitive to the uncertainty their customers are facing. To do otherwise might make us appear oblivious to the current world around us, much less their needs. Stop with the "ABC" (Always Be Closing) approach of sales and start helping your clients and prospects by providing resources and guidance to solve their business problems that your product or service can provide.

"Always be helping" is the right thing to do anyway, pandemic or not. A couple of strategies: (1) Determine early on if your prospect indeed has a problem that you and your company can solve; (2) See where they are in their own decisionmaking process. If you have solutions, try to engage the decisionmakers early in the process; you have succeeded in selling your products and services many times before. If you are dealing with new prospects, they might not know how to get buy-in inside their own organization, but you do. Try first to understand the customer's buying process, and then together you can navigate toward the satisfaction the customer is seeking.

These days, using the educational and consultative approach, you gain by cultivating real relationships with trust and open — no agenda — conversations. These discussions indeed can be done effectively on the phone or online. The new mantra? Always Be Helping.

Michael Hoffman is a participating adjunct instructor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.