Namaste and the New Normal

No, this is not about how the traditional Indian greeting form: the joining of palms at the chest level to start a greeting or end a meeting, called Namaste, is now becoming the most celebrated and often ignored legacy of Indian culture.

The Corona virus outbreak has made it important to keep our distance between people, and greet each other in many non-contact forms. Namaste is just one of them. Even a hand wave is sufficient recognition, I suppose.

What the Corona virus wildfire-like spread out has given us is a chance to reflect on the New Normal: rapidly depleting supplies, work-from-home collaboration, and the prospect of significantly reduced social engagement. Some notes on dealing with the situation:

Empathy

The entire country seems to be on a hoarding spree. Hoarding is just a wasteful exercise. You are going to have to ask somebody for something one of these days, and you will find what you hoarded is now quite insufficient. Elderly who don't have the time or resource to go shopping are going to find it difficult to fend for themselves. School children dependent on meal plans are going to go hungry, fall ill, and get to hospitals that you have to pay for.

Learning to live with minimum needs is going to be the new normal. Learning to live by caring for others is going to be the new normal. Learning to let go of masks we hid behind (even as we wear a new one) is going to be the new normal.

I am inordinately proud and in awe of how my head of sales, Katya, showed amazing empathy today. She is working from home, and has her elementary school-going daughter at home. She posted on social media that she's willing to host another 3 children for moms who had to go to work.

Engagement

Work-from-home and virtual meetings are resetting the way humans are used to work. While this may not continue for too long, many companies are going to find this much easier to deal with, as they get rid of huge overheads. Many employees are going to demand this privilege as they are finding it better suited to their lifestyle and family time.

Engagement beyond just selling or pushing decisions in meetings is going to be the New Normal. Physical spaces create experiences, mindset, and execution styles. With work-from-home, people are now the screens on which they work. How do you build engagement in this new ecosystem?

Many sales folks are concerned about their Q1 quotas, and the first half of the year. This is where Marketing can step up and play a significant role. We were on a client call yesterday, and the head of Marketing outlined some key to-dos:

• Build content that focuses on a range of self-service enablement, as buyers will not be in the same room, and their decision making should be supported by useful content that they can self-serve
• Build authentic, humorous, and contextual content. People are under stress and being sold to is going to be the least of their priorities. Authenticity helps build the case for your product, humor makes it easier to recall your name, and context will always be appreciated for critical decision making
• Build a vast library of videos, as people working remote "are not going to read yet another of our self-supporting white paper!"

Etiquette

With the plethora of tools at our disposal--from marketing automation to auto dialers to sales propensity trackers to everything else that we deploy to track every pixel trail of a prospect, Sales and Marketing consider it entirely ethical and acceptable to pummel prospects with constant barrage of self-serving messaging.

In the New Normal, the most successful Sales and Marketing units will be those who observe Etiquette. It could be as simple as switching focus on to what is the friction point that separates our prospect from success, and helping remove it. As more prospects stop coming to an office, stop using a phone, and change patterns, it is more important than ever to bring Etiquette into everything we practice and build not just customer-centric, but customer-sensitivity in everything we do.

Equality

I bring this up last as this is the most important. There will be no more "A woman's role is in the kitchen" or "Men are cut out for these jobs" assumptions. My flight from Delhi to San Francisco last week was piloted by an all-woman crew. In the U.S., women graduates outnumber men by over 8%, and there are more women post-graduates and doctoral candidates than men.

Women, people of color, diverse gender, and sexual preferences are EQUALLY human as the rest of us. A Covid19 slays any of us breathing homo sapiens in equal measure.

The New Normal will force an erasure of preferential practices, force Equality as a platform for collaboration, and will enforce transparency if we don't voluntarily do it.

What are your thoughts on how the new normal will be different? I would love to include your responses here.

Be safe. Be curious. Be empathetic.

Karthik