B2B sales has changed forever. Are you ready?
Good selling is grounded in the ability to craft a relevant and value-added buying experience. That’s true whether you are selling virtually or in person.
But for sales reps to be successful at virtual selling, the whole sales organization must adapt to a new way of working.
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Adapting to a New Way of Selling
Many organizations are reorganizing around a new vision of team selling and sales enablement that is critical to virtual selling success. Everyone in sales is now on a level playing field—we are all, in essence, apprentices.
One way to understand this new environment is to picture a conductor leading an orchestra. Sales professionals must become masters at coordinating all the moving parts in the buying process to achieve the outcome they want. Having a clear strategy to orchestrate the process is what separates average salespeople from the masters of virtual selling.
Think of sales activities as happening either “frontstage” of “backstage.” Now that 80% of sales engagements are digital, sellers must prepare before they go “on stage” by coordinating people and schedules, leveraging resources, and sharing key content that will help the buyer’s decision-making process while nurturing the relationship and building trust.
- Frontstage Activities: Synchronous communication and collaboration where you and the participants have live interaction through a virtual meeting platform such as Zoom or Teams, a phone call, or Facetime.
- Backstage Activities: Any communication or collaboration that is asynchronous, or not happening live or in real time. Examples of this include a text message, email, recorded video, voice mail, or a digital sales room.
Mastering virtual selling involves learning a set of tactics, processes, and technology solutions that equip you to successfully nurture prospects, share information, conduct demos, and host meetings without the benefit of being face-to-face. Here are three key takeaways to help you succeed in a hybrid world.
3 Takeaways to Enable Virtual Selling
Companies that are successful at virtual selling must support their sellers on an ongoing basis and help them make the transition from in-person to hybrid communications. This requires helping them acquire new skills and knowledge for the frontstage and backstage selling activities that form the backbone of virtual selling.
So what does it look like for a company to be enabled in virtual selling? There are three main elements: people, processes, and technology.
People: Adopt a Team Approach
Pre-pandemic, selling depended on a rep’s singular ability to build rapport, solve problems, and articulate value to the buyer—mostly by him or herself.
Today, virtual selling opens up the possibility of team selling—tapping SMEs and executives, leveraging just-in-time learning, and executing value-added backstage activities. When executed together correctly, these deliver a superior buyer experience.
Companies that rely too much on lone-wolf sellers will not be able to compete against pack selling in a hybrid world. Selling as a pack allows individuals to specialize and play to their strengths.
A collaborative team also learns, adapts, and overcomes challenges much faster than lone wolves. A collaborative selling team will consistently outperform a team of lone wolves.
Takeaway 1 > Think about specialized resources that may help the team be more productive at frontstage and backstage selling. This can include:
- Meeting coordinators to free up seller time and help schedule more meetings;
- SMEs and executives to participate in frontstage virtual meetings live or in a prerecorded video;
- Technology specialists to help sellers troubleshoot frontstage problems and ensure backstage technology is working.
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Process: Create Repeatable Processes
Virtual selling success is dependent on how well sales meetings are run. In a sales organization, there should be a process in place that constantly examines what works and what doesn’t—to help improve the templates your team needs to orchestrate frontstage and backstage activities. This allows sellers to become fluent in executing them.
Working as a team, they can hone in on what works best for your company in producing results, versus having each seller create their own set of templates and learning from the experience. Success comes faster for teams that are set up to share best practices and disseminate and standardize what “good” looks like.
Takeaway 2 > For backstage selling, have processes in place that support buyer communication and engagement before or after frontstage meetings. As with frontstage processes, it’s all about repeatability and testing to find what works best for your organization.
Technology: Deploy an Anchor Platform
For frontstage selling, the anchoring technology is the virtual meeting platform. The value of a reliable and drama-free platform cannot be overstated. Without a working platform, there is no frontstage selling.
The anchoring technology for backstage selling is a sales enablement platform. More precisely, it’s a set of capabilities within a sales enablement platform that specifically supports the backstage selling processes.
A sales enablement platform that properly supports virtual selling should include technology that allows individual sellers to quickly and easily:
- Share digital content (documents and videos) with individual buyers (typically via email) and track how the content is being used
- Record videos talking to buyers or voiceover PowerPoint presentations
- Create interactive content that goes beyond trackable documents or rep-generated videos, for example embedded polls, fun facts, or meeting scheduling
- Deploy buyer-specific digital sales rooms (DSRs) for each opportunity in their pipeline to share relevant content with the buyer and help nurture the process
- Analyze intelligence gathered from recorded calls, shared content, and DSR activities, as well as other information from your CRM system
Takeaway 3 > Update or invest in new technology to support frontstage and backstage activities and ensure sellers have the tools they need to orchestrate a hybrid selling process.
Getting an Edge on Your Competition
Your sellers cannot just “wing it” when learning how to sell virtually. It’s time for companies to realize how important this discipline is. However, sales professionals shouldn’t be discouraged by the number of adjustments needed to pivot toward virtual selling.
Your competitors are likely struggling with adapting to virtual selling too. For each incremental effort you make, you will be able to magnify that difference to selling success. But if you fall behind in your maturity journey toward virtual selling and sales enablement in general, don’t be surprised if one day, you find your company is hopelessly behind the competition. Employ these three takeaways to become a “master”of virtual sales.
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