2020 offered sales leaders a career’s worth of crisis management experience in the span of a few months. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic’s lessons for management are far from over. Sales leaders now must prepare for greater uncertainty, continued disruption, and increased volatility in the first six months of 2021. We’re calling this a “recovery period,” but it wont look like one at first, given the pandemic’s worsening.
Things will, however, get better, as vaccine supply and delivery ramp up. In fact, the prospect of a short, sharp recalibration of demand may well accompany a precipitous drop in infection and death rates by late spring. Bottom line: sales leaders must prepare for both recovery and for worsening conditions in the interim, and guide their organizations through compounding uncertainty.
In support of our audience’s need for up-to-date ideas and strategies for recovery planning, the Sales Management Association is staging a multi-topic conference series in Q1. We’ll focus on issues vital to leading and supporting adaptable sales organizations: sales planning and performance management, training approaches for agile sales forces, and sales operations effectiveness.
The conference will combine live sessions, curated content organized in learning tracks, peer-to-peer interactions that allow for both learning and networking, and real time working sessions focused on addressing members’ highest priority issues.
