Business View Civil and Municipal | April 2021

17 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL APRIL 2021 “The New Normal: B2B Sales and Digital Transformation 2021 Survey” examines the impact of remote working on B2B sales teams one year later G roove, the leading sales engagement platform for enterprises using Salesforce®, recently unveiled the results of a new industry survey examining the impact of remote work on B2B sales teams in the United States. The survey of 765 sales professionals found that the impact of COVID-19 has created long- lasting challenges for revenue teams, including increased workload and fears generated by an uncertain economic outlook. Forty-two percent of respondents indicate that customer churn from organizations impacted by COVID-19 is the biggest challenge facing their revenue team in 2021, followed by impacted sales budgets. To compound matters, it is clear that most sales teams won’t be returning to a pre-COVID selling environment anytime soon. Less than 6% of those surveyed are taking in-person meetings today and over 60% of respondents indicated that they won’t resume in-person meetings until the fourth quarter of this year or 2022 and beyond. “One year into our nationwide shutdown, it has become apparent that widespread remote work is here to stay,” said Chris Rothstein, co- founder and CEO of Groove. “The B2B sales landscape has changed dramatically, with industries that have been slower to adopt technology embracing digital transformation as a result. Companies are leaning into the uncertain economic outlook and are embracing the reduced costs and productivity gains that they’ve achieved over the past year with automation.” Over 50% of respondents said their workloads have increased post COVID-19, while only 2% have seen a decrease in their workload. With this shift to remote work and increase in workload, nearly 50% of respondents have increased use of sales automation technology to help with this ‘new normal.’ The top three sales technologies used by respondents to work more effectively are: CRM systems (87%), web conferencing tools (84%) and sales engagement platforms (75%). These three areas outperformed all others, including sales enablement platforms, conversational intelligence, data sources, sales readiness platforms, social networks, and remote collaboration tools. As a result of this accelerated digital 50% OF B2B SALES PROFESSIONALS SAW THEIR WORKLOADS INC DURING THE PANDEMIC, NEW SURVEY REVEALS OPENING L INES