Remote or virtual selling is here to stay, like it or not. Most salespeople thought it wasn’t as effective as in-person meetings, but they’re coming around. Besides, the better your content experience, the more willing prospects will act. By making your content more interactive, you can better engage, challenge, and lead the prospect to make a more-informed decision. How? With no-code solutions.
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Before we get there, though, is it really true that virtual selling is less effective than in-person selling? “Nearly 70% of salespeople surveyed responded that remote selling is not as effective as in-person,” according to a study by Corporate Vision. “Sales reps cited audience multi-tasking, limited interaction, and passive presentations as the main reasons behind their lack of confidence.” Some of that may be true, but things have changed.
Ten months after this study was released, McKinsey research noted that B2B sellers and decision-makers had gotten used to the idea of virtual selling, with 83% now saying it’s as effective or even more effective than pre-pandemic models.
Clearly, there’s been a change in perceptions and expectations.
Virtual, interactive selling on the rise
Why might that be? For one, the technology has simply improved from a year earlier when sales teams and prospects were scrambling to shift their habits. No-code software, for example, has empowered sales professionals to rapidly create interactive experiences that engage the prospect and cause them to act.
Cognitive scientists recently studied how B2B buyers engage with content, and the results support how important interactive content can be for reaching your audience.
The study describes how people learn and form memories. That process has three phases: encoding, maintenance, and retrieval.
The first phase includes how readers perceive your content through their senses. Then they have to store it through their working memory, and then they can retrieve it later on.
This research helps us understand how to create content to have the most impact, for which interactive experiences prove the most effective:
Using animations, concrete visuals, and interactive experiences, buyers are more motivated to act on what you have to say. In other words, the more interactive, the more buyer interest.
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How no-code software helps remote sellers
While tech like video calls and collaboration tools have enabled sales teams to enhance some aspects of prospect interaction, presentation and follow-up materials have remained largely the same — stale, static, and unremarkable. The rise of no-code platforms will change that by enabling individual sellers to fold interactivity into the entire sales experience, without the need for additional resources.
With traditional sales enablement like PDFs and PowerPoint presentations, the prospect is often just hearing a lecture — a linear, slide-by-slide monologue. They’re not engaged because they’re often not engaged. See what I’m saying? Interactive content lets you be in challenger sales mode, where the conversation can move back and forth, up and down, while asking questions and answering objections.
The trouble is that building this kind of challenger sales material can be, well, a challenge. Historically, you’ve needed an entire army of designers or engineers to pull it off. But not anymore. Modern, no-code software unleashes the creativity of the sales professional, without the help of designers or developers.
The same way that you drag and drop content into a website builder, design system, or sophisticated presentation software is the same way you can create your sales enablement material nowadays. You can add multimedia like images, audio, and video. You can add buttons, scrolls, and tables of content throughout to create an entire ecosystem to better explain your organization’s solutions.
Additionally, PDFs and PowerPoints don’t give you data or real-time capabilities: Did they open the presentation? Did they get all the way through it? How many viewed it? What if you need to edit a slide or stat? No-code software fixes these issues. You can get granular data on who did what, which is increasingly more important since B2B buyers debate and purchase in teams.
Ride the no-code wave
I’ve always been a big believer that technology can solve a lot of business problems. Not every one, but a lot. That’s why I’m excited that the no-code revolution is swelling among many leaders I talk to, and the most innovative are the ones ready to ride the wave.
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