More efficient sales in India - thanks to lockdown

 “A leap of faith by our staff – how lockdown has made us more efficient”

Klaus Maier explains how M+V made sure international companies had efficient sales and administration in India during lockdown. A discussion at the Indian-German Business Summit

M+V supports over 100 international companies with everything from hiring their key staff to managing all their administration and sales orders. Lockdown may have stopped all non-essential shipments, but all these companies relied on M+V to pay staff and keep administration and operations going through the lockdown and unlocking. For M+V this meant immediate digitalization from March 2020 when the day lockdown was declared. M+V had to bring 160 employees overnight digitally so that they can work from home easily. “We are in a service organization, so the process was comparatively easy, but there were many executives who worked on desktops in our offices, so we had to get them laptops and a stable internet connection really quick. Our customers were depending on us.” M+V learnt some things fast:

·  Adapting to Digitalization overnight was challenging, but it went smoothly because our executives took a leap of faith in the organization that we could support them in these difficult times.

·    Once travel was allowed again, people went to their hometowns and so we had to establish secure internet and processes across the whole of India. Until today many are working from their homes – some more than a day’s travel from any of our offices.  Klaus said he was surprised this had been so easy – but gave all the credit to M+V’s IT department.

·   Selling tangible items intangibly is a new normal. How your customer wants to communicate with you matters and you need to match your communication methods to theirs. With selling happening generally face to face, suddenly Sales staff working for M+V’s clients had to put systems in place so that they can sell their products online.

· Clear Communication: How to communicate, what to communicate, and is your communication perceived in the same way, were the important points M+V focused on – for speaking to clients and for helping them speak to their customers.

Klaus was quite skeptical as to how all of this is going to work but it all went smoothly. One has to look as to what resources are available, and whether your organization is fit to achieve those goals.

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