How To Transition to Virtual Selling
Sales has changed, maybe forever. Have you adapted to virtual selling, or are you being left behind?.
Globally, the Covid-19 pandemic has certainly torn up the playbook for networking and selling face to face.
Those with inside sales experience have had a marked advantage against those starting to grapple with Zoom and screen-shares since March.
Mindracer has had the pleasure of helping clients adapt and pivot to this new normal, and have helped others thrive during a challenging time. The key is to act fast, while demonstrating empathy for your customer. Everyone in every business had been thrown a curve ball.
The pandemic has driven innovation, collaboration and desperation in equal measure.
Although this transition happened quickly, many business leaders, including the Mindracer team, are expecting this to be a permanent influence on the way people work.
Are you ready? Business leaders need to think about how to make this work for now, and into the future.
How to adapt processes and systems?
The immediate effect of stay at home, quarantine and lockdown orders, sales teams were scrambling to move from field sales to working from home (WFH). Inside sales teams also had to move from offices to home-based operations.
Most sales teams use a stack of cloud-based tools, but few people were experienced in working from a home environment for such a long period.
Leaders were no longer able to look around the office and see if their team looked like they were working.
Team members missed the collaboration and hearing the live calls around them from team members, missing on on the overheard gems that can be picked up on the sales floor.
However, we need to remember in these unprecedented times that the fundamentals of sales remain unchanged: we still need to establish relationships, listen to the challenges our prospects are facing and offer meaningful solutions.
If you know your team is struggling with virtual selling, or they’re doing just fine but you need them to be doing great, one challenge is likely that they’re still using stories and collateral developed in pre-COVID times. They just will not be as effective with out of date or tone deaf messaging.
Here’s a suggestion:
Get your sales and marketing teams together virtually for a prospect workshop where you walk through “a day in the life” for your customer both pre and during COVID and rebuild your sales and marketing focus around helping them succeed.
Pre session, talk to your best customers and get some guidance from them on how they are really being affected by COVID, record these interviews and share them with your team as a kickoff to the workshop.
Have your most empathic reps play the role of the customer and describe how their life and challenges have changed, based on what they have personally heard from prospects and customers.
Challenge your existing team to tailor the value prop and sales language to match the prospects new needs.
Review the decks and stories you are using in meetings, and update them to match the needs of your customer today.
Work with the sales team to roleplay some discovery and demo calls where these new issues come up - work as a group to document great responses.
Identify any areas where you need new sales or marketing collateral, and check your existing messaging across all your marketing and follow up email templates.
Launch with a renewed customer focus.
Your team should be as effective, if not more effective remotely because of the avoided waste with travel time.
If the above example was helpful to you, we have many more to share.
How can Mindracer support this transition?
Whether you work with us in a Fractional VP Sales, or a sales consulting or training capacity, we can help you with this long-term transition to virtual selling.
With our decades of sales experience, we have a tried-and-tested process. We start with a comprehensive strategic assessment, including a review of the processes and systems used in sales campaigns. We use this analysis to identify where there are gaps in your processes and systems, and then provide solutions or training where those gaps need to be filled.
We have extensive experience with service and software companies, helping clients improve the impact of sales activities, close rates, and generate more leads from inbound pipelines and account management.
Want to know what we can do? Here are a few testimonials from happy clients.
In our clients words:
“Our sales are exploding” SaaS CFO.
“Brought rigor to what was a haphazard sales process” SaaS CEO
“Transformative and palpable increase in velocity and process” SaaS CEO
In the long-term, sales teams shouldn't be any less effective when they're working from home.
Fundamentally, salespeople - whether SDRs or account executives - are doing the same work as before this pandemic. Our support is designed to ensure value is communicated, processes support remote relationship building, and close rates improve.
With the right strategy, processes and systems in-place, we can ensure you succeed throughout and beyond this Covid-19 pandemic. Mindracer Consulting is here to support your sales team during the months ahead, with a view to working together for your long-term success.
Do you have a sales challenge that needs a high-impact solution?
Get in touch, for a no obligation chat. Book a video consultation today.