The Sunday Mail
Robert Gonye
Sellers who were used to high-touch, in-person customer meetings have had to instantly pivot to remote virtual meetings.
This new normal has left many sales organisations across the globe scrambling to provide their sellers the resources they need to operate successfully and efficiently from home and drive remote selling.
Ensuring sellers are as effective as if they were engaging with customers, prospects and colleagues face-to-face is the new business requirement. Shifting your sales approach, deploying technology to support sellers and doing it all in a timely manner are all now relevant ways any business owner must assist his employees.
A few recommendations on managing the smooth transition to remote selling when implemented will create the winning edge.
Embrace interactive presentations
The last six webinars I attended since the Covid-19 lockdown have been virtual sales meetings. Most would argue that video conferencing is the go-to solution.
But is this enough? While video conferencing through platforms like Google teams or Zoom are intended to make meetings feel more personal, studies show this isn’t necessarily the case.
Video conferencing does not deter people from multitasking or completely zoning out.
Only a minimal percentage of people feel as comfortable on video conferencing calls as they do on phone calls. This leads to potentially low levels of engagement.
Utilising interactive and engaging presentations can go a long way in exciting your prospective buyer about the conversation and maintaining participation.
Drag-and-drop capabilities using interactive presentation tools allow companies to create animated PowerPoint presentations from traditional files to present in a new and more appealing format.
If your competitors are putting buyers to sleep with run-of-the-mill, static PowerPoint presentations of awkward video conferencing calls, your animated approach will differentiate you and make your product or service outshine competitors in the purchase decision process.
Just make sure they understand how to embrace the technology.
Grow sales impact
through value selling
In most cases, a buyer’s decision is made before they even pick up the phone to speak with you or your competitors. This means when they do engage with you, they already know about your business, products and services. Before a decision is made, customers look to you to share something they don’t already know.
Quantifying your product or service’s return on investment or comparable total cost of ownership will both give your buyer the information they need to sell your solution internally and build confidence and credibility in your solution.
Interactive value selling tools like ROI allow team members to capture personalised data in real-time from buyers.
Utilising a progressive tool is proven time after time to improve, win rates as well as increase purchasing from the first seller almost 40-60 percent of the time.
Remote learning as a support
Currently, most business events have been either cancelled or postponed for the foreseeable future. This includes many sales kick-off events and trade shows.
This does not mean you can’t ensure your sales representatives have the knowledge they need to sell and meet targets successfully. Micro learning, the use of video modules meant to educate sellers “just-in-time” versus “just-in-case” have been proven to be more effective than traditional, classroom-style learning.
Relying on modern learning management systems (LMS) allows your sales organisation to go beyond one-time training and on-boarding by using incremental education created to better prepare sellers for sales interactions.
Not only do organisations get sales knowledge out to teams quicker, but companies that leverage LMS for sales training can also track completion, who needs additional training, release new content upon completion of each module and ramp sellers faster.
Use your marketing
budget to the fullest
During an economic downturn, marketing budgets are often the first on the chopping block.
That means, more than ever, it is imperative to understand what content works and doesn’t.
Informed buyers purchase from sellers who offer relevant content at each step of the buying process as they offer support which solves an emotional need that is justified mentally.
If your business outfit is wasting a limited budget on sales collateral that isn’t going to be utilised by sales reps, you are hindering your ability to close deals.
How do you identify what content will bring your business the highest ROI, and when?
Using sales enablement platforms integrated with a CRM can empower you to connect content directly to revenue.
Such platforms eliminate guesswork by offering data insights showing what has led to closed opportunities in the past.
The main expectation of the business is to invest in what works, what grows revenue and increase a customer’s spend and relationship with the business. Hence, sales enablement platforms also provide automatic recommendations for what assets to utilise, archive and promote. This provides marketers confidence that their assets and budget are having a positive impact on business and sales to produce results.
Be familiar with the
cost of “doing nothing”
The general belief is that the transition to remote selling has been unexpected and complicated. This shift can create concerns surrounding budgeting, business impact and more.
If organisation is weighing the benefits and risks, the cost of doing nothing will be much more detrimental to your business than shifting around budgets in order to deploy key sales tools and systems to sustain sales revenue.
To reduce overall cost, and decrease risk, consider incorporating a sales enablement platform that utilises all of the strategies outlined above. In a time such as now, filled with stressors and unknowns, utilising these tools and tips will save your organisation both time and money.
Make sure to steer clear of complicated deployment processes and overpriced solutions that offer unnecessary bells and whistles. Rather, find a sales enablement platform that your organisation can get up and running as quickly as possible to meet your employees’ needs at home at the same time offering an uncompromised customer experience.
Now is the time to provide your sales reps the tools and support they truly need to excel while working remotely
Robert Gonye is a business growth expert and influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected]. The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
