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Unbiased Structured Communication with Leads and Prospects. Impact of Covid19 on Our Business Prospecting Approach.

Introduction

With the continued global expansion of businesses and various aspects related to it, such as employees, clients and partners, the viewpoints, communication style, and perspectives of working individuals are changing rapidly. This eventually leads to biases in various business processes, including the crucial communication part, which may not be accepted or accessible to everyone. It’s vital to understand the biased and unbiased structured communication in order to manage better and convert business leads and prospects. And, the continuing Covid19 situation has made it mandatory and crucial for businesses of every size and niche to accept unbiased structured communication to successfully acquire prospects and maintain a flawless business relationship with them for an extended period of time.

Let’s Understand Cognitive Bias in Business Communication

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According to communication and marketing experts, a cognitive or unconscious bias is a very specific way for business people to take information and communication to perceive information and make decisions based on that information solely with uncertainty. Simply to put, the way a person makes his/her decision based on non-detailing or non-proven information is called cognitive bias. Cognitive biases are mostly unavoidable and typically have a very negative connotation. But there are business people who use cognitive bias for positive matters such as to process an overabundance of information, process information without enough context, quick decision making, and identifying communication elements that need to be remembered.

Unconscious bias becomes problematic when business folks use it unwarily of their own biases and assume the decisions they take are acceptable by everyone. So, it’s very important to understand our very own cognitive biases, how they are affecting our understanding, and the information we share.

Here we will discuss how Let’s Nurture team has successfully adapted the unbiased structured communication and with its leads and prospects, and successfully shielded its business supremacy against the Covid19 downtime. Before that, let’s discuss the types of biases that businesses usually face during their lead and prospect conversion.

Types of Biases That Emerge During Lead Generation and Lead Prospecting

Geography

Geography

Countless studies have proved that business people usually skew more toward clients from HICs or High-Income Countries, and clients from LMICs Low- and Middle-Income Countries are generally underrepresented during lead prospecting. In the absence of unbiased structured communication, it is somehow impossible to assert whether there is geographic bias or variations in the process quality with lead prospecting. The odds of acceptance with geographic bias also impact peer review. Eventually, it will hamper business results due to improper lead filtering and ineffective prospect communication.

Racial

Racial

In the wake of revolutionary global protests against racial injustice, organizations all around the globe have been doing less or more to prevent racial inequality. Though racial bias is minimal these days due to the advancement of modern thinking, still it can be experienced at some points of business transitions. Mentioning a potential lead or business prospect’s race or ethnic beliefs during a business communication is definitely a big no as it will directly affect a prospect’s potential to convert into a successful client due to the sentimental soreness. This can be extremely damaging to an organization if the prospect makes a note of it and may explain it through a review or other via media.

Location

Location

Assumptions about influences and motivations that are based on location and culture also create bias communication with leads and prospects. We can also relate ethnocentrism to the location bias as it refers to judging another culture solely based on the standards and values of one’s cultural value. Accepting location bias during prospect nurturing will hamper the profit margins, organizational reputation and overall growth. To avoid location and culture bias, cultural relativism can be adopted by organizations which positively promotes an individual’s personal beliefs should be respected and understood by others in terms of that individual’s personal belief and culture.

Gender

Gender

Gender bias in lead generation and prospecting can lead to a lack of proper communication towards prospects. This eventually leads to crucial information being withheld from a specific gender of leads. The lack of communication interest and behavior gap will create scenarios of lead underrepresentation. So, gender bias in workplace communication should be stopped with careful precautions. The workplace module of organizations needs to adopt precautionary measures that eliminate strong gender stereotypes, gender-based roles, and identification and dismantling of leads based on their gender.

Industry

Industry

Pushing a lead forward in the sales cycle means discussing the most appropriate solution with the clients. Sales individuals should have the obligation to appropriately discuss and help prospects. With industry bias present in the lead prospecting system, consultative skills of business people are eminent to be degraded. Industry bias while lead communication will not only demotivate potential clients interested from different niches to accept your business offerings but also obstructs your valuable business transition to a different production environment.

Conscious vs. Unconscious Bias – Why Biases are Unnatural?

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When we are consciously biased towards a particular person, culture, group, physical abilities, religion, decision, sexual orientation, gender, or judgemental characteristics prejudicially, it’s called conscious bias. Unconscious bias occurs when our conscious decisions are affected by our surroundings and characteristics included in them which directly or indirectly affect our personal experiences. Both conscious and unconscious bias undermines and clouds our decisions, and can be extremely damaging towards personal or organizational growth.

This modern business world demands equal inclusion of all genders, national origins, races, ages, ethnic backgrounds, and sexual orientation to all of our business offerings. Adapting the negligent, defective, and careless biased communication to lead prospecting or any other business structure will bring down business reputation, revenue generation, and overall growth.

At Let’s Nurture, we believe both conscious and unconscious biases are unnatural as in both cases these decisions are affected by our surroundings. With bias, we re-conceptualize our original decisions for unnatural or discriminative reasons which eventually hamper our reputation, goodwill, and constructive decision making. Ironically, all of us are bias toward our decisions to a certain limit. Whether it’s a business decision such as lead prospecting or something related to our day to day to lives, most of our judgments are affected by biases either in a good way or a bad way.

Adopting positive biases such as hyperbolic discounting, anchoring effect, illusory truth effect, peak-end rule, loss aversion, empathy, optimism bias, confirmation bias, etc. will help business individuals with proper decision making, understanding prospects, their end to end needs, successfully closing deals, and maintain a long-term business relationship with them. Whereas, negative biases based on characteristics such as racism, gender, location, habituation, acquiescence, social desirability, culture, halo effect, etc. will degrade the work performance, qualitative standards, and growth.

Impact of Covid19 on Let’s Nurture’s Business Prospecting Approach

With the drastic change of the business world due to the covid19 pandemic, businesses are forced to face harsh realities. This pandemic has drastically changed the business aspects that we may use to know before. In reality, every business is going through major changes in its operation to survive through the harsh pandemic effects.

Impact on Client Continuation

The first and probably the harshest problem businesses including Let’s Nurture face is the problem with client continuation. Like every other business out there, it’s difficult to lose clients, and that to be in such a crucial time, whether it’s due to the lack of client’s business boom, to encourage cost savings, or just for sake of business damage reversal. As clients are thinking long and hard about their financial decisions and may end their partnership with associated businesses, we have to fit appropriately in these gaps and make them understand how retaining the business relationship with us will help them during this dire time. Since losing clients has never been an option for us, we work closely with our clients with new and improved business offerings so that our clients will get the best of their investment with us.

"Even during the covid19 scenario, more than 90% of our clients are successfully continuing and new clients are joining with us due to our improved approach and business advantages that they are going to receive with us."

New Market to Gain

Due to covid, there is a whole new market to gain. Well, this is a positive note but with some extreme challenges that the Let’s Nurture team is successfully handling. Someone’s loss can be someone’s gain. Though we are well-wishers of every business out there, it’s a matter of survival and thrives at the same time. Since the beginning of covid, our team has been extra proactive to nurture productive relationships with leads and prospects. We make our clients understand the importance of complete digitalization and the challenges that they may face and should successfully tackle with Let’s Nurture.

Sales Challenges

Previously sales were the face of every business, but now its sales with retention. No doubt, the sales growth has been the disadvantage for businesses during covid. As face to face, the traditional business approach is still not possible to present days, selling your offerings virtually is the only other option available which Let’s Nurture has been successfully doing for years. But with our improved ways to connect with leads and prospects, we took our sales to approach to the new heights of success. Instead of slowing our sales efforts, the covid situation has skyrocketed our efforts to gain new sales thus requiring new plans to acquire leads, converting them to sales, stay ahead of their expectations, and successfully continue with them for a long tenure.

Making Business Future Ready

Covid forced businesses to determine their success and health for at least the next year. Determining business facts that may need special attention or an improved approach for the upcoming future is a must now. As organizations including Let’s Nurture are feeling pressure to cope up with business challenges and create an innovative approach to solve them, making our business future-ready for at least one year ahead is a great challenge for us. But, we are not stopping at all and improving our various business processes including the unbiased structure communication to achieve quality prospects, target a new market, getting new sales, and offering our clients the very best reasons to continue with us.

How Did Let’s Nurture Overcome Biases While Adapting Structured Communication with Leads & Prospects?

Team Let’s Nurture strongly believes in ideal communication that is sensitive to age, race, country, gender identity, ethnicity and other categories, and should be acceptable by all means. From the very start of our organization, we have implemented unbiased structured communication criteria to all the threads of our business process, especially to the areas of sales and marketing. To ensure unbiased communication with business leads and prospects, we have implemented certain unbiased standards for our team members such as:

Stereotype Avoidance

Avoid language that indicates stereotypes about a group of people

People-First Language

Always put a person before any condition, whether it’s emotional or physical.

Avoidance of Racial Identity or Ethnic Connotations

Stating the race of a person is always not relevant to a business story.

Aware of Preferred Gender Identity

Determining and mentioning gender identity should be minimal and asked only to help with specific business offerings.

Use of No-Explicit Language

Compete avoidance of offensive language no matter the scenario.

Eliminate Color Symbolic Words

Always choose language that does not offend individuals or promote bias.

Complete Avoidance of Tokenism & Patronizing Language

Elimination of special offers and favorable words that may support a particular group or ethnicity.

What we want you to write about?

bystander

Tried and tested with bystander effect

global-communication

Use of quality global communication

generic-communication

People generic natural communication

ear

Listen first and reply later

mindset

Thorough study of client mindset and deliver solutions according to that

emotional-iq

Use of emotional IQ that influences the best emotions of ourselves and others

say-no

Saying NO is the best option than discussing a non-relevant or non-productive topic

honest

Be concise, be honest and add value to the communication

Geographical-bias

Case 1: Overcoming Geographical Bias

By implementing processes independent of prospect location, we were able to substantial onboard projects from obscure regions. We have successfully onboarded a renowned university-funded child care app from Jordan, and a highly trusted pharma company CRM project from Ghana, Africa. And, one of Let’s Nurture biggest clients currently is based out of a tier-two city in Gujarat.

Racial

Case 2: Overcoming Racial Bias

It is a general perception that owing to local conditions and culture, people of certain ethnicities are only looking for a cheap deal. Our experience has been quite the opposite in multiple cases like whether dealing with Asian Americans, African Americans, or Southeast Asian clients as long as the value proposition is properly communicated, costs/rate were never seemed to be an issue to our sales and client prospecting team.

We have successfully onboarded Indian clients at USD 20 per hour rate, and have even seen Southeast Asian clients willing to spend USD 25 per hour for ongoing team deployment. Most of our long term accounts are all glaring contradictions to the above mentioned successful unbiased conditions.

Location

Case 3: Overcoming Location Bias

In our long years of service experience, the biggest blocker in business communication is time zone difference and consequent irregularity. To overcome the condition, we have created flexible work schedules based on teams rather than projects. This has helped Team Nurture to successfully cover all geographies globally according to business aspects.

We were able to reconnect with a long-dormant lead just because of properly scheduled communication as per their business time zone. Our two biggest accounts from 2019/2020 are from California and Australia, which are at the diametric end of time zones, creating the potential for maximum conflict. But thanks to our successful implementation of unbiased location based business communication. both have been successfully continuing with us for over 18 months now without a single complaint.

industry

Case 4: Overcoming Industry Bias

There is an unconscious tendency to presume negatively about a lead based on past experience. However, as part of our tried and tested process, we try to assess every opportunity independently while at the same time ensuring mistakes from previous iterations are not repeated. This approach has helped us to incrementally become one of the market leaders in fantasy game platform development. During 2019/2020, we onboarded and delivered four different fantasy platforms to varying degrees of milestone success. We now have proven experience in not just cricket fantasy but other global sports like baseball, NFL, and even eSports like Counter-Strike, Assassins Creed, etc.

conclusion

At Let’s Nurture, we understand that every time adding value to our client communication is a must to us. We intend to stay consistent with our use of words, tone, and other forms of communication. We also maintain integrity with our unbiased structured communication and treat each of our clients with the exact same opinion that supports our core business values. We do understand that being both tactful and honest is the need of the time as the whole covid19 situation has changed the global business scenario upside down and we intend to serve our beloved clients with such integrity, passion, and not to mention utmost satisfaction.

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