The coronavirus pandemic has not only disrupted the way we live, think and work, but has successfully upended consumer trends, businesses, marketing strategies and their operations. Many businesses froze, unsure of how to move in a new scenario while others decided to go through trial and error looking for some way to overcome their current hardships. Needless to say, the economic consequences of the pandemic on B2B marketing agencies have been dire.

Going forward in 2021, these businesses are damage controlling in three essential phases:-

1) navigating the current crisis with resolve and resilience,

2) planning for the recovery,

3) re-imagining the next normal and adopting B2B marketing services tailored to the new world post pandemic.

Leaders have been constantly adjusting how their organizations sell in the face of new customer habits in these trying economic times. We are at the cusp of a digital inflection where B2B marketing services and sales operations are now fundamentally different than what they used to be. The effects of the upheaval in marketing and sales trends for B2B businesses that were in motion before the pandemic, can be seen in the following ways:

1. A Shift in Spend

Many B2B marketing agencies are generally reducing their rate of spend. But a sizable number of them are also increasing or maintaining it, depending upon their business size, sector and most importantly, their geographical location in the world.

2. The Shift to Digital

Owing to the social distancing practices, B2B marketing agencies find digital interactions as two to three times more important to their customers than traditional sales interactions. The customer’s preference for digitally enabled sales and B2B marketing services saw a significant jump with a sharp peak in the use of mobile apps, social media and online communities.

3. The Shift to Remote Sales

Born out of necessities such as lock-downs, quarantining, shelter-in-place orders, etc., almost every B2B marketing agency has made the jump to remote selling astonishingly fast. As much as 90% of them have been working via videoconferencing, phones, web sales models, even though skepticism regarding productivity remains. Unsurprisingly, this trend is more pronounced in some sectors than in others like- media, technology, telecoms etc.

Even though the future of B2B marketing and services look grim from our current vantage point, there is much hope for it in the near future as most of these newer approaches are believed to be equally or more effective than the models used prior to the pandemic.