Working through sales deals remotely has become part of the new normal for B2B salespeople. But building an efficient Virtual Selling environment is not a cakewalk and does not only involve moving all your meetings to an online format. In short, there’s a lot more at stake!
In today’s business environment, to build a successful virtual selling strategy, sales teams have to use the right sales technologies to share relevant information with prospects, to nurture their prospects, conduct product demos and host fruitful meetings. The right salestech and engagement methodology can help boost remote selling techniques.
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Companies the worldover were forced to either freeze budgets or slow done their buying cycles. But for salespeople to be able to effectively deal with the current economic and business challenges, sales leaders need to identify the most important aspects in a virtual selling environment and fill in the gaps.
Here’s what can help:
Warming Up and Prepping for every Online Meeting
In the pre-Covid days, face to face meetings and events gave sales people a chance to properly network with prospects. That in itself meant more coordination than setting up a Zoom meeting with a prospect.
The difference is, during those pre-Covid days, sellers had to adequately prepare for their meeting with the right pitch deck, agenda and supporting material. But while going into a virtual sales meeting, many salespeople aren’t prepped enough or don’t have enough information about the prospect or account.
This unpreparedness can lead to prospects dropping off sales cadences and conversations far earlier on in the journey.
Seeing how today’s virtual selling environment is here for the long-haul, it is crucial for teams to adopt the same attitude and level or preparedness to their online zoom meetings as they did for actual face to face meetings during their pre-Covid days.
Studying your prospect/account on social media, networking with more than one buying decision-maker, understanding a prospects preferences are some of the most basic elements to keep in mind.
Meeting more than one Decision-maker from an Account
Sellers and prospects are both home today, the fact that neither are on the move as much makes it easier for people to jump onto instant meeting requests and calls.
This might mean that sales teams have suddenly experienced more numbers of meetings per day. But to create more impact, when scheduling sales followups or next-meetings with prospects, ensuring that every meeting is not just with one prospect but with a couple of the decision makers will allow teams to optimize their time and effort to yield better results. What is most important for sales teams to keep in mind during this global slowdown – an increase in numbers of sales conversations does not necessarily mean quotas will be made!
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Holding your Prospect’s Attention
In a face to face meeting, it is easier to command attention and ensure that your prospect is absorbing what you are trying to share. During video conferences as well, when there are just 2-3 people participating, it is easier for sales people (usually the host of these meetings!) to command everyone’s attention.
When there is a higher quantity of people from the prospect’s company participating in your sales calls, sales leaders have to understand that there will be distractions. Keeping meeting participants attentive and involved throughout the call by asking ‘the right’ questions, making the conversation interactive and meaningful, including relevant information about your own product’s pluses viz a viz the competition are some things to keep in mind.
Focus on Strengthening your Followup Skills
Lead nurturing is important to gain new customers and keep existing customers. When sales and marketing teams have a repository of prospect-related supporting content ready, it is easier to plan impactful nurture cadences. Documenting the steps before planning a followup cadence will help sales leaders to create a better framework to work through.
Keeping important details like meeting notes and call recordings handy in the central CRM along with a record of email exchanges between the concerned sales executive and the prospect is a first step. Sales leaders need to then use the insights from their CRM to understand how prospects are interacting or consuming the content.
Virtual Selling Is Here To Stay!
Not many teams can disregard the many advantages of a remote selling world. Virtual selling, when done with a proper structure and plan can yield results faster than traditional approaches that involve physical meetings.
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