Selling without Seeing the Customer

The Covid-19 epidemic might just have changed how we do sales for years to come. While you and your customers may be under quarantine, business has to go on.  As such, many people have started to work remotely from home, and these include many of your customers.

Even when the epidemic is over, many of your customers could be working remotely on a permanent basis. In general, people may have a fear of face-to-face meetings with strangers for some time. As such, even when business is back to normal, you may need to sell without actually seeing your customers in person.

The bright side is, if you are able to sell without seeing your customer, you would be able to cover more territory with lesser time, saving a lot of travelling time and costs in the process.

Key Challenges

When you develop new customers, build relationships and close deals without seeing the customer, you may encounter the following challenges:

Unlike face-to-face selling, you can’t say:

• “I’m just around your area”;
• “I’d like to buy you lunch”;
• “Can we just get to know each other”

In fact, saying you’d like to share some information will just be greeted by “sure, send the information over”. And then nothing happens after you send over that information. They key thing is how you can engage with customers, rather than merely sending 

Some of the other challenges could also be:

• Unable to get virtual appointments
• Unable to build mutual trust without seeing each other 
• Unable to do demos
• It just feels awkward for you and/ or the customer

Sharpening Your Value Proposition

As such, customers need to have a crystal-clear idea of what’s in it for them, by connecting with you online. In general, here are some angles to explore if you want to get the customer’s attention:

• How does your solution change the customer’s results for the better? 
• What problems are you solving?
• What is the tangible benefit for the customer on using your solutions? 
• How do you provide enough value to motivate your customer to be engaged? 

Devoid of the face-to-face relationship-building, customers would tend to demand that sales people be more forthright with what they value can bring to the conversation.

For example, we define one of our value propositions as “We customise use cases that reflect real work situations so that participants can immediately use and overcome work challenges“.

In essence, you can explore how you rephrase your value propositions in one of these 4 ways:

1. Can you help the customer to Achieve a goal?
2. Can you help the customer to Resolve a problem?
3. Can you help the customer to Improve their current situation?
4. Can you help the customer to Avoid a future problem?

It is thus crucial that the sales person is able to justify and convince the customer of a strong value proposition, so that the sales person can bring the customer conversation to the next level.

Tools We can Use 

In the distant past, selling without seeing the customer means selling through the phone, sometimes with e-mail support. In today’s mobility-driven world, there are many tools at the sales person’s disposal, such as:

• Phone
• WeChat
• e-mail
• Webinar tools (Zoom, Tencent Meetings etc)
• LinkedIn, etc.

Do note that you can categorise the above into 2 main categories:

1. Tools to make contact (such as phones and most usages of WeChat); and
2. Tools to create awareness of your value proposition (such as blogs, webinars and videos) 

The first part of the above categories is easy to understand. As a sales person, you will need to reach out to customers and hustle 拉客 for the sale.

A typical cold call script can be as follows:

"Hello, Mr. XYZ."  

• "Thanks for taking my call."
• DO NOT use any of the meaningless, overused pleasantries like, "Is this a good time?" or "How are you today?"   

Introduce yourself.      

• "This is Susan. Susan Star with XYZ Company." 

State your Value Proposition.

• “…The purpose of my call is to explore ways to better manage your supply chain so that it reduces your costs and still increase customer satisfaction. We have helped 4 other companies in your industry to reduce costs by 30%. We may be able to do so for you too.” 
• "Mr. XYZ, is it OK if I can ask a few questions to find if we can help you deliver better performance?"

There could also be better cold call scripts out there, and the scripts will differ between different industries and products. However, sometimes even the best crafted scripts may not be enough to get you connect with your intended target customer.

This is because each day, your target customer could be harassed by hundreds of other sales people. Your customer may not know whom to trust and allocate their time accordingly. In the physical world, initial trust with customers could be built by:

• Participating in trade shows and conferences;
• Road shows;
• Physical showrooms; etc.

When selling becomes more virtual, such physical ways of brand and trust building with customers would have to be moved online as well.

The good news is that sales people could now leverage on many online tools to build a presence and create awareness with customers.

Sales people can share online:

• Successful customer case studies;
• Product and technical demonstrations;
• Web conferences;
• Special offers and other promotions, etc

Unlike using web sites to showcase the company, customers expect sellers to provide more specific insights about a certain application or customer group. Customers expect such insights are constantly updated and sent to them in a digestible format. Customers also expect to interact with sellers should they have questions without being pressured to make purchases. 

Sales people would have to be skilful enough to make contact with customers, as well as to build their online reputation and trust, without seeing those customers. 

One thing to note is according to research by HR Chally, the sales person is now the single largest factor (39%) in a customer's purchasing decision.  No other factor – product, quality or pricing – equals the impact of a salesperson. 

Hence, even without the usual physical marketing support, there are a lot of tools at the sales person’s disposal to sell without seeing the customer. 

Getting Referrals

If I were to take an honest look at how I have successfully sold to customers without seeing them, the one key source of such sales is through referrals.

I got referrals of many kinds, including:

• Existing and past customers;
• Customers who did not or could not buy from us;
• Partners;
• People who used to work with our partners;
• Ex-schoolmates
• Ex-colleagues, etc.

In my own view, I believe that when someone referred us to a customer, the customer tend to trust us more, and we tend to be able to get deals quicker. Building your referral network could be an important step towards successful selling without seeing the customer.

So how did I get the referrals? No, I tend NOT to pay referral fees. I might return the favour using other means (by giving other referrals to the referrer) or treat the referrer to a nice meal. In fact, I have many referrers turning down my offers to give a referral fee or to share the profits. Instead, the key reason that they gave us a referral is because they knew we will be taking good care of the customer.

Perhaps it is a common phenomenon in Asia. Few people are unwilling to risk their personal reputation and trust if they don’t have the confidence that the seller they referred to others is not doing a good job. The reverse is also true for many people: they feel that they are strengthening their relationships with their friends and associates by referring a seller that really does a great job. 

Hence, while rewarding others for giving you referrals might be a fair business practice, merely giving referral fees are unlikely to increase your share of referrals. Instead you might want to try doing the following:

• Build trust and relationships with as many people as you can reach
• Go the extra mile for customers
• Deliver as promised
• Don’t be afraid to ask

Next Steps! 

In all honesty, selling face-to-face is tough enough. Due to the emerging trends set forth by the Covid-19 outbreak, more parts of the selling will and has to be done without seeing the customer. This trend is unlikely to change when we emerge from the shadows of Covid-19. The good news is that with the technological tools at our disposal, we could now reach out to more customers in faraway territories that was perhaps unimaginable just a year ago. 

As sales people, there are only 2 choices:

1. Give up, and find a different job;
2. Rise up to the challenge, and achieve outstanding results

May you find greater success!