It’s been nearly 18 months since we began to radically change the way we live and work in response to the covid-19 pandemic.
The pace of the change we have all experienced is unlike anything we’ve known before.
Overnight we were thrust into a worldwide ‘working from home’ experiment. It tested our digital skills to a scale hitherto unseen, stretching the capacity of both our IT functions and WIFI networks to deliver.
Our people had to adapt to new ways of working, whether leading teams remotely or selling in a virtual world. And we all had to develop new strategies to remain resilient and productive during weeks and months of physical separation and isolation.
These skills are of huge value to the development of our leaders and teams and it is highly likely that they will be called on again.
As mass vaccination continues apace and lockdown restrictions ease globally, we are all set to transition into the next phase.
The question is: what does the ‘next phase’ look like?
We want to support organisations in developing future strategies, ensuring they’re as well prepared as possible for whatever challenges lie ahead.
Our objective is to create a community with our customers on the latest industry thinking.
As part of that initiative, Andy Crotty and Chris Cummins brought together a team of senior representatives from the life sciences sector together to reflect on what they’d learnt through the pandemic. And what they think might happen next.
- Regular face-to-face engagement with our customers has historically led to degrees of complacency.
- Virtual interaction has taken us out of our comfort zone. It has taught us to be more flexible, more focused and better prepared.
- One of our key challenges is in finding ways to apply those lessons to all customer engagements but in a way that enables our sales teams to focus on desired behaviours and not merely traditional sales metrics.
The message is clear: we have a golden opportunity to reinvent ourselves as part of a hybrid approach to customer engagement that embraces the dual benefits of face-to-face and virtual interaction.