Virtual Sales in a COVID-19 World and Beyond

5 Steps to Virtual Sales Success

Face-to-face selling may seem like a thing of the past right now, and the jury is still out on when it will come back as the norm. One thing is certain, however: even after the pandemic, the new normal will include accelerated levels of virtual selling.

When COVID-19 changed how we do business, all our sellers, here at NetApp, became inside sellers overnight, and virtual selling moved from being an option to being essential. To thrive in this new reality, it is crucial that sellers excel at virtual sales.

The Business Case for Virtual Sales

Virtual selling is a movement that has transformed our go-to-market strategies. It’s not just phone or email. It’s also social and chat, as well as online, zero-touch purchases. Virtual selling uses the power of the entire digital spectrum to reach target audiences. With that in mind, it’s important to view virtual selling as an entire sales process and an essential approach that can be effectively applied well beyond the current crisis.

Virtual sales teams are closing larger and larger deals because they make it simpler and faster for the buyer to get to your product. According to research firm McKinsey & Company, “Almost 90 percent of sales have moved to a videoconferencing (VC)/phone/web sales model, and while some skepticism remains, more than half believe this is equally or more effective than sales models used before COVID-19.”[i]

Why Virtual Selling is Here to Stay

Even before the pandemic, many buyers just didn’t have the time for face-to-face meetings over dinner or a game of golf, according to research. In fact, a report from SBI concluded, “This research yields compelling insights into how Buyers want to engage with your sales force. The results are clear: Buyers do not want to see you.”[ii]

Technologies have boosted the effectiveness of remote selling. Tools and features such as screen share, enhanced resolution, and 3D modeling display your product and solutions digitally, and enhance and accelerate the sales experience.

Sellers are seeing this shift in the process. In fact, they see that 70% of the purchase decision is typically made before buyers engage a salesperson.[iii] And because the buyer is better informed, they don’t always seek face-to-face contact to make a purchase decision.

6 Steps to Virtual Sales Success

In my career as a sales leader and author, I have created high-velocity virtual sales teams through innovations in digital sales techniques and best practices that support sales growth. Recognizing the shock to sales professionals of becoming virtual overnight, I want to share my expertise on the steps to virtual sales success, and help companies adjust to this new selling environment.

Step 1: Enable buyer confidence

In a virtual sales environment, it’s important to instill buyer confidence in the product and your company. Buyers must believe that when the purchase is complete, they will receive the value described and that it will resolve their business pain. This requires strong brand recognition, so that buyers understand the solutions you offer and the problems they solve. Strengthening brand and enabling buyer confidence includes offering a strong pre-sales journey with “snackable” and focused content, along with easy access to trials.

Step 2: AI-based digital sales rooms

When using screen-sharing applications like Zoom, it’s challenging to nurture the relationship and keep the conversation going, even after the initial sales discussion. The best technology available to solve this problem is a digital sales room, which is like coupling a Zoom meeting with a Slack or Teams channel; however, the functionality is much richer. With a digital sales room, the content shared in the meeting (including documents and links) remains available to your buyer and the sales team, enabling ongoing interaction even after the call is completed. Additionally, all the content is digitized and analyzed with AI, ML and NLP to help sellers and sales leaders understand the level of buyer engagement, buyer sentiment and the relationship strength reps have with a particular buyer.

Step 3: Leverage social selling

According to a recent study, 78% of salespeople who use social media outsell their peers.[iv] In the absence of one-on-one sales calls, the power of social media channels for selling and networking is unparalleled. Social media is also effective for reinforcing messages, measuring contact, and building relationships, all key facilitators of sales success. Tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator allow you to create lists of accounts and leads. You can also identify contacts and new prospects at existing accounts and engage with them on a meaningful level. Twitter and other social media channels facilitate impromptu online conversations that provide insight into your target accounts, and the analytics these channels offer are helpful in tracking connections as well as gathering response and success data.

Step 4: Digitize for activity visibility and analytics

Before the pandemic, sales leaders had an idea what their sellers were doing; they were aware if their staff was visiting buyers, or could hear the “noise” from sales calls when on the sales floor. When working virtually, there is no way to know what sellers are doing without tracking those activities in a digital system. Automated logging of tasks and activity tracking frees your sellers’ time, and digital tracking systems offer sales managers the opportunity to mentor their staff for greater sales success. If reps are spending more time on ‘busy work’ versus customer or partner meetings, sales managers can see that and are empowered to coach them to support good sales activity.

Step 5: Align sales deployment to the buyer

When buyer expectations change, your sales channels change along with them. Aligning your sales deployment to the buyer requires ensuring your GTM segmentation strategy provides the right engagement for the buyer type. High-effectiveness channels are designed for buyers with complex buying needs; high-efficiency channels are for buyers that desire reduced interaction. When you know your buyer and apply the right engagement strategy, you facilitate stronger relationship-building and more effective sales strategies.

A high-effectiveness channel is essential to managing and growing large strategic accounts, especially when sellers have less time with buyers during the purchase process. In this model, seasoned sellers can be partnered with less experienced inside sellers to process less complicated and/or add-on purchases and be a highly available resource for buyers.

On the other hand, high-efficiency channels such as online digital purchasing facilitate a high number of buyers desiring a digital or remote buying experience. By providing resources to help buyers in real-time, walk them through the process, or answer questions, you increase the rate of success of online purchases. For buyers who want remote engagement, a discrete inside sales team can focus on accounts or territories where sales can be completed in an ongoing virtual scenario.

Take Advantage of Virtual Sales

There are advantages to a virtual sales strategy: reduced travel costs, the power of digital analytics, and team efficiencies. The true imperative, whatever the current climate, is about closing sales and retaining customers. The right selling structure, one that takes advantage of virtual sales, is what boosts the numbers and gives your team the inside advantage.

Lori Harmon Profile:

As a recognized industry thought leader, keynote speaker, and board member, Lori Harmon has extensive business experience in creating high-velocity virtual sales teams through sales innovation and virtual sales strategies that support growth in a digital era. She seeks to pay it forward by sharing her expertise with others to benefit them as they lead and transform their own sales organizations.

[i] McKinsey & Company, “The B2B digital inflection point: How sales have changed during COVID-19,” https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-b2b-digital-inflection-point-how-sales-have-changed-during-covid-19

[ii] SBI, “Are you Listening? Many Buyers Prefer Inside Sales,” https://salesbenchmarkindex.com/insights/your-customers-are-telling-you-to-reconsider-inside-sales/

[iii] DemandGen, “B2B Buyer’s Survey Report,” https://e61c88871f1fbaa6388d-c1e3bb10b0333d7ff7aa972d61f8c669.r29.cf1.rackcdn.com/DGR_DG061_SURV_B2BBuyers_Jun_2017_Final.pdf

[iv] Fidelman, M. Study, “78% Of Salespeople Using Social Media Outsell Their Peers (2013),” https://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2013/05/19/study-78-of-salespeople-using-social-media-outsell-their-peers/