


Generating leads is crucial to growing sales. But with the pandemic affecting face-to-face interactions, now is the time to embrace innovative digital solutions.
Faced with the challenges of COVID-19, business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations are lacking proximity to their existing customers as well as to any potential new clients. This makes it even more challenging to engage with them early in the buying process, which is crucial for B2B sales organizations to generate a steady and growing sales pipeline. As a result, companies are being forced to shift to remote selling, including via video conferences, email, phone calls, and online chats. And this trend is not likely to go away as the pandemic subsides. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, about 80 percent of all B2B sales interactions will occur on digital channels.
To learn more about this environment, we conducted a study of the financial service industry in 2020, asking 618 B2B sales agents about the obstacles they are facing in the sales process and the measures that could help improve their sales. More than four out of 10 agents point to the need for more leads to fuel top-line growth with their accounts with small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and they say the lack of leads with new customers is their second biggest obstacle (see figure 1).
On the customer side, COVID-19 accelerated the changes in consumers’ buying behaviors, which have become even more unpredictable. Many B2B buyers are conducting their own research and discovery before engaging with potential vendors—turning to extensive Internet searches as well as other publications and blogs now that the pandemic has put face-to face conversations somewhat out of reach. Unfortunately, this means that many leads are only identified after B2B
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