How COVID Has Changed Sales Leadership

Seona Tully is a regional sales director at HubSpot. In this episode of the Sales Leadership Show, Seona uses data and real case studies from the Hubspot CRM to explain how COVID has changed sales leadership. Resources: Seona on LinkedIn HubSpot.com HubSpot Sales Enablement Survey Transcript Will Barron: This episode of the show is brought to you from the salesman.org HubSpot Studio. Coming up on today’s episode of the Sales Leadership Show.   Seona Tully: Yeah, absolutely. I do think that relationship building from a team perspective is great. And when you know your team at that different level of depth, you have an idea of the perspective of where they’re coming from, even in conversation in communications. I think there’s a lot of really big positives that can be taken in terms of post-COVID, the impact that has had on business structures and the way that we operate as businesses.   Will Barron: Hello, sales nation. My name is Will Barron and welcome to today’s episode of the Sales Leadership Show. In today’s episode, we have Seona Tully. She’s a sales director over at HubSpot, and on today’s episode, we’re getting into how COVID has changed sales. We get some excellent case studies and data from HubSpot, and we also cover some data from the HubSpot Sales Enablement Survey, which you can find in the show notes of this episode. There’s tonnes to go out, tonnes of value. And so, let’s jump right in. Seona, welcome to the Sales Leadership Show.   Seona Tully: Thank you so much, Will. Great to be here.   46% of Businesses Have Made Changes to Enable Successful Remote Work. Seona Talks About How Hubspot Have Handled the Remote Work Transition · [01:23]    Will Barron: It’s great to have you on. Okay. So, we’re going to dive into how COVID has changed sales. Well, I’ll pose this to you in a second, wherever you think it has or hasn’t, we’ll look at some hopefully some case studies from HubSpot itself. We’ll have some data from a recent HubSpot Sales Enablement Survey, but I think the place we should start this conversation as Seona, it is we have a number that shocked me, right? The survey said that under half 46% of businesses, I’m quoting here have made changes to enable successful remote work. Now, two things here. One, does the number freak you out to the only 46% of businesses have made these changes? And what did you do over at HubSpot when I guess all of a sudden you just hold one day that your team doesn’t come to work anymore?   Seona Tully: Yeah, absolutely. The number really does shock me and to be honest, Will, I think it’s a changing number. I think if we rerun the survey in 12 months time, we’d be in a very different scenario. Most companies have realised at this point in time that they need to adapt the way that they’re working. But yeah, let’s dig into the data a little bit and how we dealt with it here at HubSpot. I mean, we were pretty lucky already at HubSpot, we were on the right track. So, from the time I started in HubSpot about eight and a half years ago now, I believe we’re a very flexible working environment already. So, we already had many of the team working from home a couple of days a week. I certainly leverage that. And even before COVID we had it by 10% of the employees were working remotely.   Seona Tully: So, we were a fairly remote friendly.