Strategic Framework: How to Identify Opportunities for Virtually Selling

Because of the growing strategic value of virtual sales, some of its most compelling advocates have introduced all manner of phrases to rebrand what we once called “telemarketing.” What else do people call selling without meeting face-to-face with customers? Remote sales, inside sales, pipeline development, digital sales, sales development, inbound sales, opportunity development, market development, account development, and telesales are just a few of the terms used. Clearly, those who deeply understand this discipline want to elevate the perceptions of its value, and rightly so.

Virtual sales models have spread rapidly into more and more sales motions. Those motions include not just closing but taking on a part of the sales process on behalf of the salesperson. Also, rather than relegating virtual sales as the exclusive domain of entry-level sales talent (or people who lack the talent to win in the field), using more experienced salespeople in a virtual model simply opens additional doors of opportunity for expanding the use of virtual sales.

Even field sales reps are spending more and more time selling virtually. In a study by sales engagement software company, Xant (formerly known as “Insidesales.com”), field salespeople increased their time spent selling remotely by 89% between 2013 and 2017 . No doubt, that percentage grew pre-pandemic and then went supernova in the last year when everyone had to sell virtually.

Apart from the economic benefits, two evolving developments are driving the adoption of virtual sales:

• Technology advancements are improving the productivity of virtual sales teams and even giving virtual teams advantages over field teams, an accelerating trend; and
• More and more businesses like buying without face-to-face meetings.

Because of these two phenomena, the boundaries keep changing for where virtual selling can outperform field sales. Generally, however, the charter of field teams is contracting and virtual teams expanding.

For B2B sales companies, the advantages of selling virtually are compelling:

• Cost Reduction. Travel, entertainment, and labor are the primary areas of cost savings for virtual versus field sales teams.
• Production. Virtual reps can take more meetings each day, send more emails, make more phone calls, send more text messages, and engage with prospects on social media, especially LinkedIn, than field reps can. After all, field reps spend some of their time going to and from meetings. Moreover, technology enables virtual reps to increase this type of activity. Conversely, closing rates for virtual teams are generally lower than those of field teams, partly because field teams have more industry and sales experience and because the field invests more time in each deal because of the deal size. However, as virtual teams move upmarket and use more experienced salespeople, the gap can close. Virtual teams can also increase the productivity of field salespeople by taking on part of the selling process (like prospecting) or by handling smaller deals in a large account to allow the field rep to focus on closing larger, needle-moving deals. Such use cases both reduce cost and increase sales productivity.

There are mountains of evidence supporting the economic benefits of virtual sales teams. For example, in a HubSpot research report of 500+ respondents, 64% of sales leaders who invested in remote selling met or exceeded quota in 2020, compared with 50 percent for those who did not. Per this article in Harvard Business Review, virtual sales reduces the cost of sales by 40% to 90% without reducing revenue.

How to Identify Opportunities for Using Virtual Sales Teams

To identify opportunities to expand the use of virtual sales, it’s useful to understand all the possibilities. To that end, there are four fundamental ways you might look at where to deploy virtual models:

By looking at your product portfolio and market segments through these lenses, sales strategists have found a variety of use cases for virtual sales motions.

Solution Commoditization

The more commoditized a product, the more likely customers will buy without face-to-face meetings. In fact, the product may be so commoditized, the transaction can happen via e-commerce with no live interaction at all.

At the beginning of its lifecycle, a strategic product may introduce a new category of solution. The potential customer doesn’t even know she needs the product. The lack of familiarity with the category often means multiple people get involved in the decision process, including senior executives. Today, for example, many applications of artificial intelligence like Conversational AI are at this stage.

At the other end of the lifecycle spectrum, people understand the category and take the need for granted. Laptops are an example. These decisions get moved down the chain of command. Fewer people get involved, even when the deal is large. Procurement might handle the purchase process with minimal involvement of the department(s) using the products. Think of office supplies.

Commoditization does not mean you have to use a virtual model. Likewise, selling a new product in a new category doesn’t mean you have to use a field sales team. Rather, the lifecycle of a product is simply a way to consider the viability of a virtual model.

Revenue Potential

Another dimension of consideration is the revenue potential. Models for revenue potential can be quite sophisticated, but at a simple level, most companies use one or more of these concepts:

• Size of the company. Probably the single most common way to divide field sales from a virtual sales team is the headcount or revenue of the company (or some other size criteria, like the size of a department within the customer account). The bigger the company, as a general rule, the more money that company will spend on solutions. Of course, there are other proxies, some quite sophisticated for looking at revenue potential. Examples might include the size or growth of a department within the customer company, the number of servers in a data center, and so on.
• Deal size. The size of the company doesn’t address a common scenario where a larger account makes various smaller purchases over time. Instead, another of the most common dividing lines between what the field sales team handles and what a virtual team handles is the size of the deal, whether expressed in a single transaction, monthly recurring revenue, or annual recurring revenue. More sophisticated sales leaders use this criterion across company sizes. Thus, a virtual team might handle all deals below X even in the largest accounts. This line has gradually moved higher and higher.

Probability of Purchase

The third way to examine virtual sales viability is through the lens of the journey a customer takes as well as three initial steps in the typical sales process. Instead of asking one salesperson to do the entire sales job for the full life of the customer, most companies, depending on the scale of the organization, divide the role into various jobs, any of which may happen virtually.

These sales steps and stages of the buyer’s journey generally correlate to the probability of purchase. For example, customers are more likely to buy than non-customers. Qualified appointments are more likely to buy than marketing leads. Marketing leads are more likely to buy than anonymous site visitors. Anonymous site visitors are more likely to buy than cold prospects.

The low probability of purchase at the beginning means that the volume of interactions with sales is high and therefore time-consuming. Because of such probabilities, sales leaders will deploy lower-cost virtual talent in the early stages of the journey, which take a lot of time to yield a small amount of value, reserving more experienced sales talent for the higher probability opportunities.?

• Identify and prequalify accounts and contacts. Sales hunters (and some sales farmers) can spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and other sources looking for the right accounts or the right people in the accounts. Some of this effort can prequalify either the account or the contact. Salespeople often do not have the best skills for this task (e.g., attention to detail). For these reasons, others can do this work more efficiently and for less money. Offshore or nearshore teams with an aptitude for this detailed work are common here.
• Validate accounts and contacts. With outreach efforts, salespeople validate and invalidate each contact and company. Because of rapid data decay, bad data can put a drag on sales production. Is the company still in business? Does the contact still work there? Is his or her email correct? His or her phone? Data validation does not require elite sales talent, so cost savings and productivity improvements can be significant. Offshore and nearshore teams are well-suited for this type of work.
• Discover insights. While the most sophisticated insights generally require industry experience, non-sellers can often gather a lot of this intel in more cost-effective ways. Again, this is another area for offshore or nearshore labor, depending on the complexity of the insight, typically requiring an appropriate college degree and some amount of business or industry experience.
• Prospect. Cold outreach to generate and qualify interest and to book meetings is another time-consuming activity. Many companies use a virtual team (often called sales development) to do this kind of work on behalf of other salespeople.
• Convert web traffic to leads, appointments, or sales. To increase conversions on the corporate website, virtual teams use chat, inbound phone, inbound email, and other contact channels to engage site visitors to buy, to schedule an appointment, or at least to capture the identity and get the permission of the visitor for follow-up.
• Follow up on marketing leads. Conversion rates of marketing leads to qualified sales opportunities and pipeline are generally higher when a virtual team (again, called “sales development” typically) dedicated to this task does the work on behalf of other salespeople. Such teams follow up faster, more frequently, and report back the outcomes more faithfully.
• Close. Virtual sales teams can close some business more cost-effectively than field salespeople can. Small and medium businesses (SMB) are a typical example. In large accounts, virtual sales teams might handle smaller deals, often working as part of a team or pod that will include a field rep.
• On-board. For more complex products, having a virtual team that ensures the customer starts using the product successfully results in higher rates of renewal and additional cross-selling revenues, some of which can happen with the onboarding rep. Again, many companies use virtual teams for most of the onboarding.
• Retain and grow accounts. Very common is letting one team “hunt” for new business and another team “farm” existing accounts, cross-selling and upselling them. Just as some hunters are in the field and some sell virtually, likewise, some farmers are in the field and others are retaining and growing accounts virtually. Virtual teams manage SMB accounts and renew, upsell and cross-sell smaller deals in large accounts, again sometimes working in a team or a pod that will include a field rep.

You can apply all of these stages to an indirect set of channel partners, as well. That is, virtual teams can find partners, validate the contact info of the partner, research the partner, cold call the partner, and so on.

Geographic Constraints

In some cases, accounts that would otherwise qualify for field coverage get remote coverage because face-to-face meetings are not practical, given the travel time. At the same time, because virtual teams can cover large geographic areas, vertical industry territories or other account segmentation criteria that are not practical with a field model become viable with a virtual team.

In summary, use these four ways of analyzing areas of opportunity for the deployment of virtual teams. Keep in mind that the boundary between virtual and field sales teams is not static. Technology is changing what’s possible. So is buying behavior, as business buyers get comfortable with buying without meeting face-to-face, just as they have gotten comfortable with buying online without talking to anyone for many product categories, as Amazon can attest.

Technology Advancements Are Changing Where the Best Companies Deploy Virtual Sales Teams

Technology has made virtual selling more and more viable. A global Bain & Company survey found that 92% of B2B buyers prefer virtual sales interactions, up 17 percentage points from a similar survey in May 2020. Likewise, 79% of B2B sellers found virtual selling effective, compared with 54% from the May 2020 survey.

Against this backdrop,?Chris Weber , Corporate Vice President, World Wide Commercial Business at Microsoft, made a provocative prediction last summer:?”In the next three to five years, the?discipline of sales ?is going to transform more than it has in the last 100 years. . . . In the very near future, [because of technology advancements] a face-to-face sales call will put a sales rep or a sales team at a massive disadvantage [compared to selling virtually].”

Apart from CRM and other table stakes technologies, a few technologies are making virtual selling more and more productive:

• Video conferencing (like Microsoft Teams or Zoom ) creates more and more of the attributes of a face-to-face meeting, like screen sharing, whiteboarding, and video headshots. Moreover, many platforms offer chat (so that team members can share notes quietly during the meeting) and live transcriptions, which allows reps to focus on active listening and not note taking and facilitates better follow-up. In that same HubSpot survey, 63% of sales leaders now believe virtual meetings are just as or more effective than face-to-face meetings. As augmented reality becomes common in these kinds of tools, the advantages of face-to-face will diminish further.
• Sales engagement software (e.g., Outreach , SalesLoft ) enables sales leadership to orchestrate, measure, and optimize multi-channel sequences of sales outreach at any stage of the customer journey, increasing rep productivity.
• Conversational AI (like Gong , Chorus , ExecVision , and CallMiner ) provides live transcriptions of all parties, detects sentiment, and highlights keywords like pricing, common objections, the names of competitors, key features, and so on. This technology greatly accelerates rep improvement and also assists marketing and product management in having rapid and nuanced market insights. This tool is especially useful for sales enablement and the development of sales playbooks used in the tools below.
• Algorithmic guided-selling software (like Seismic , Highspot and Showpad ) helps reps take the next, best step in a complex selling process by providing them with context-sensitive coaching and content at each step of the sales process.

Of course, both field and virtual teams often have additional technologies, starting with a CRM, Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) software, e-signature software, and so on. However, the video conferencing, conversational AI, algorithmic-guided selling, and sales engagement software are the kinds of technologies that are not only increasingly closing the gap between field and virtual sales teams but, as Chris Weber said, will soon put field sales teams at a disadvantage.

The Looming Change in Business Buying Behavior

The pandemic forced buyers and sellers to conduct most business remotely, and the experience is changing business buying behavior permanently. In short, both buyers and sellers liked working remotely. In a PwC survey conducted in November and December 2020,?71% of employees ?found working from home to be successful. Employers were even more optimistic, with 83% calling remote work successful.

As a result, companies are looking at adjusting their real estate portfolios and their talent recruitment and retention strategies. Moving forward, many employees want more flexibility to work at home at least part of the time. In our own survey across 13 countries, 41% of the 6,158 people working from home prefer working remotely. These kinds of findings will give talent advantages to companies who embrace work-from-home strategies.

No doubt, many B2B leaders are assuming things will go back, more or less, to the way they were, once the pandemic has passed. They won’t. B2B buying behavior has changed. More decision-makers and champions will not be in the office, and more of them have found virtual meetings worked just fine.

Sure, some workers don’t have an ideal environment to work from home. Others enjoy the comradery of the workplace. To be sure, spending time in small groups, face to face, strengthens relationships and helps instill culture.

Still, a lot more people are going to work remotely in the future, and remote buying and selling is going to grow. Think about the huge pool of more experienced sales professionals who either have families or want families and would like to spend more time with them instead of alone in hotels.

Conclusion

Sales transformation implies a journey with a destination. In truth, there is no destination. The goal of sales transformation is to improve the return on the sales budget. That quest never ends because competitive pressures, market preferences, and technology advancements drive change.

Many employees like working from home, and many salespeople do, too. Buyers are increasingly comfortable with virtual meetings. Technology is making virtual selling more and more compelling. Companies leveraging virtual sales hit quota more often. In short, companies that embrace virtual selling will have a competitive advantage in the future because virtual sales channels offer a higher return on investment in many scenarios than field sales teams do.