As digital business pivot slowly become permanent, B2B Sales need to adopt digital-first growth strategies, enabling them to sell to digitally savvy customers everywhere they expect to engage, interact and transact with suppliers.
- Virtual Sales
- Infrastructure
- Training
- Conclusion
Virtual Sales
Virtual sales events started out of necessity are here to stay because of ROI and accessibility. Sales leaders are already exploring ways to equip and engage their sales teams by investing in new tools for virtual success, including changing the venue of annual sales kickoff meetings to a virtual environment, using lessons learned from the past few months of virtual sales.
Investing in virtual selling infrastructure
To be successful in virtual sales leaders are adjusting sales playbooks, modifying sales pitches, redefining and practicing frequent digital interactions with buyers leveraging scenario-based models.
Sales enablement leaders are adjusting the mechanics of virtual selling, equipping their frontline sales forces with virtual selling playbooks (including modified sales pitches), virtual buying personas, and scenario-based selling practices that leverage multiple, frequent digital interactions with customers.
Redefining Sales Strategies For Virtual Selling:
- Branding. Display company branding during virtual meetings to convey brand messaging and stay top of mind with customers. Use company-branded virtual backgrounds or company-specific screensavers highlighting the brand logo, motto, tagline, or a customer testimonial.
- Demonstrate Value Faster. Sharing critical buying information, discuss product features, and provide demos, more quickly in a virtual meeting than you might in a face-to-face setting. Using tools like virtual customer conversation playbooks, polls, or questionnaires to help sellers capture the attention of customers immediately, and deliver value quickly and effectively.
Successful virtual events and pieces of training
To deliver high impact in a virtual setting, sessions need to be structured differently to remain collaborative and engaging.
- Divide the kick-off into multiple smaller sessions. Breakup up virtual events into shorter sessions that take place over several days or weeks.
- Reinforce desired behaviors. Build-in activities to help sellers apply what they’ve heard and change behavior in the long term. Use knowledge checks, expert-led small group discussions, and guided manager-led activities to help sellers process how what they see and hear relates to their accounts.
- Encourage morale with diverse programming. To counter one of the biggest challenges of inspiring sellers and building morale. Complement large group sessions with small group meetings, leveraging immediate access that technology can provide. Encourage executive drop-ins, customer Q&A and top performer best practice sharing as ways to celebrate the success of the team and motivate them for the coming year.
To navigate the world of virtual sales, sales leaders position their organizations to gain customer confidence and trust, accelerate their renewed go-to-market strategies, and drive growth.