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I had quite an argument with someone in my network recently who is also a sales manager. He kept saying, “I can’t wait till we can get back to visiting customers in person” and “We’ll soon be rid of these annoying zoom sales calls.” Why would anyone want to go back to hours in traffic jams, parking stress, hours of driving, when you can sell from your desk?
I’ve taken a very clear line with my team: We will continue with remote selling as much as we can into the future. And I am challenging them to get better at it all the time. Why? For me, it’ simple Porter’s 5 Forces logic: A company who can lower it’s cost of sale has a competitive advantage!
Let me give you an example. Last year, one of my reps would maybe drive 2 hours to present a proposal to a customer. Good that they present proposals, I insist on that by the way. With luck and great planning, they might get 3 such calls done in a day. With remote selling, presenting a proposal takes 30 to 40 minutes. It’s easy to do 3 calls like that in day, leaving plenty of time for other sales activities.
If one player in a market can lower their cost of sale substantially by being more efficient, then others will have to follow, or lose out.
We did a brainstorm last week and came up with 30 ways we can use virtual meetings at various stages of our sales process. My favourite was one of our team using Zoom to demonstrate one of our products in action at a customer site: The prospect was able to ask real time questions, and the credibility of seeing our products at a reference site gave them enormous confidence to buy from us.
So, my message is a simple one: Coach your team to be fantastic at remote selling. Ask them to use it as much as they dare. Yes of course, they should go and visit customers, but that meeting will be all the sweeter when customers see their time is being used wisely throughout the sales cycle.
In our last newsletter, we covered some basic set up points for remote selling. By now, your team is probably fully comfortable managing sales calls via remote meeting platforms. This month we focus on ‘sharpening the saw’ with remote selling. Here we offer some tips to develop the skills of your team:
Get creative across the whole sales process. Remote meetings offer new possibilities:
The beauty of virtual meetings is that you can test and practice new ideas within the team before going live with customers.
“You Just Don’t Understand” (Women and Men in conversation) by Deborah Tannen. Whilst not a new book, it still offers some well-researched insights into how the dynamics of conversations play out between genders. Tannen’s research methodology is really interesting and is as valid in sales meetings as it is at home!
“Whiteboard Selling” by Corey Summers & David Jenkins is a great resource for companies who can demonstrate some kind of ROI with their product selling. It explains neatly how to co-create a business with customers on the back of a napkin, (or a whiteboard, or a virtual whiteboard.). This is a skill that is really worth developing with sales teams.
The 4th edition of “Riding the Waves of Culture” by Fons Trompenaars & Charles Hampden-Turner has just been released. First published in 1997, the authors are world renowned for their work on cultural communication. This book is an excellent resource for anyone selling across cultures.
Video prospecting is hot right now. This involves sales teams making a very short video (1 minute) with the following typical format:
In the message header, salespeople can write “Video for you”.
Because this type of approach is not being used that much right now, it has novelty value that can increase conversion rates. Videos can be sent via Linked-in, email, text, Loom etc.
As mentioned in our last newsletter, we are proud to be a partner of Allego. Why did we decide to add this offer to our portfolio?
We believe Allego’s platform is the best sales enablement platform on the market, and offers the best tools and technology to train, coach and guide salespeople in the field. It can handle custom sales methodologies easily, which aligns well with the way we work.
It means we can help design a highly specific effective custom sales methodology for your sector, and then ensure it gets fully implemented over time. Plus, Allego allows knowledge sharing between salespeople which is a very rich, underutilised form of learning for sure.
To find out what it could do for you, contact anderson.hirst@sellinginteractions.com