Making it Personal: Reinvesting Unused Travel Budget Into Useful Sales Tech

It’s that special time of year. No decorations or lights are needed. There’s no virtual party to throw or attend. That is, unless you count a good, stiff drink when it’s all over as a celebration. I’m talking about budget season and this time around things are different, particularly for those in sales.

Traditionally, sales leaders would now be scouring product roadmaps, event calendars and revisiting past  expenditures to gauge budget needs. However, with social distancing bringing travel to a crawl, the second largest portion of most enterprise budgets is in limbo. Further, while traveling for face-to-face meetings, product kick offs and trade shows can add up, it’s essential for driving the end all of business measures: sales results.

So, while budget questions remain open, it’s clear sales leaders must find a way to close personal gaps. And nowhere is that more true than in complex sales, like technology and software, where the ability to educate and provide some “hand holding” is imperative.

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Follow the money

Prior to the pandemic, Certify estimated 445 million business trips took place annually. In October, Travel Intelligence released results of a survey related to the impact of COVID-19. In it, just 20% of respondents felt they’d take an international business trip in the next six months, only 28% were considering domestic ones.

Bottom line executives might applaud the savings but that’s short-term thinking. Travel budgets cover a lot more than in-flight WiFi and late night snacks. Certify’s research shows for every dollar spent on business travel, companies realize a $2.90 increase in profit and $9.50 in revenue. That’s what comes from in-person sales meetings, prospect dinners and other relationship-building activities.

So, where should the budget once reserved for sales travel go since face-to-face is no longer an option?

In a way, you just need to follow the money – only trace it back to where it originated. It’s imperative that sales look for technology that will allow for more personal, powerful engagement. That’s especially true whereas many decision makers are liking the savings brought about by a new remote workforce. Employees are productive and enjoying the convenience of working from home, too.

There will never be a full return to what we once considered normal – so now is the time to look ahead. 

A better way

Since March, we’ve learned a lot about how to demonstrate product value remotely. However, the migration to video-conferencing platforms wasn’t a fit for all companies and sales teams. While Zoom and WebEx are easy to grasp, they only let someone “into the room” – they have basic presentation functionality – the tools to teach or sell remain behind a screen.

An hour long video conference just doesn’t come close to what can be learned in-person. Watching someone do something isn’t the same as doing it yourself, and previously, prospects could get that hands-on experience with in-person demos. Without that capability, you lose something fundamental to retention, and that’s particularly true when educating someone about a sophisticated product like software.

The good news is, technology is closing those personal gaps. Further, in some ways, it’s even offering improvements by providing a sustainable and better way to sell remotely.

It’s all about the experience

Virtual labs is a technology that’s been around for over a decade. It allows salespeople and sales engineers to easily upload exact product versions to the cloud for demos and proofs of concept (PoCs). They can then deliver these wherever needed, so long as users have a browser and internet connection. This, in turn, can reduce sales costs and time because there’s no hardware to ship and install, no need to bring in IT – you don’t even need permissions to get behind a prospect’s firewall.

Further, virtual labs can provide hands-on experiences – prospects can try the actual product – which is the second most effective way for retaining information. Plus, real-world scenarios can be incorporated, highlighting a product in action so prospects can be assured the solution will be able to handle their specific pain points.

Still, not all virtual labs are the same, so the following are tips to keep in mind and capabilities to consider:

• Virtual Visibility: One of the biggest issues with sales PoCs is a “black box” scenario; a lack of insight into the behavior of prospects. You want to be able monitor engagement in real-time to see who is trying your solution, where they have had difficulty, what key features were missed. This insight allows sales to step in, provide direction and close deals. You also want to track and analyze all sales opportunities with end-to-end engagement to raise you return on investment and improve programs. Be sure the solution you’re evaluating can provide the right visibility, virtually.
• Keep it Simple: The more user-friendly the solution, the greater the likelihood of adoption and sales, whereas difficulty leads to disappointment. Make sure your virtual IT labs are easy to use and integrate with your teams other primary tools and resources in a single, centralized platform. Keep the focus on selling, not processes.
• The Right Provider: Large commodity cloud service providers are great for low-cost storage and raw power. However, they don’t offer the purpose-built tools and automation of virtual labs in a business acceleration cloud, so heavy lifting is needed to replicate products and build real-world challenges. If your company mandates use of an AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, just make sure the virtual lab solution you’re evaluating can sit on top of it and easily integrate.

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Finally, remember you don’t sell to faces, you sell to people. You need a platform that combines the social elements of selling with the capability to fully educate prospects with hands-on, real-world experiences. Sales leaders must find a way to reallocate travel budget into tools that will compensate for what’s been lost. You can close those personal gaps, right now, and in a future that will undoubtedly have more of a remote focus.