What can a decade old InsideSales farming team teach you during Covid times?

#memoirs #3 #sellingRemotely

It's safe to say that by now entire forests would have fallen to be turned into books, if we could take all the advice around how businesses can continue to thrive or how teams could become more efficient with remote-working or selling during the COVID-19 pandemic; if only our local governments would allow us to get to a publisher' office! (Le Sigh!) It is interesting how the entire world of B2B/B2C selling is (still) adapting to this new situation where our customers and our sales teams are bound by restrictions that make it hard to have face-to-face interactions. Sales driven companies around the world are monitoring this situation carefully and many major firms are even considering lowering of sales quotas or targets, in the wake of this global event. This uncertainty is two-fold, and is driven by - 1) volatility in client businesses and 2) an internal (feeling of) loss of control. This article focuses on the latter.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”

Sales has always been part art , part science. The art refers to the dance of seduction that a sales person does while trying to get a prospect or an existing customer interested in what they have to say ... not what they have to sell. A large part of a sales person's confidence in their ability to be successful therefore lies with what they believe is the strength of the connection that has been built between them and their core accounts. Connection - is critical for a world that seems (on the surface) to be driven by cold, hard, data driven decisions and technological differentiation in a competitive marketplace. Not convinced by that statement? Let me offer some evidence ... as COVID-19 became big enough to start tipping the scales of local economies, technology companies across the globe started to reach out to their customers, inquiring if they were doing okay. "Can we be of help?", they said. "We are here for you ... stay safe!", they said. "Would you like to rethink that vendor-switch? Why take the risk now?", they asked. This was an act of forging (or rechecking?) connection, in a world that had catapulted itself into chaos. Suddenly our closest customer champions have gone dark on us, emails and voicemails are often unanswered and there is an uncomfortable "wait period" that Sales people are having to get comfortable with, because they can no longer catch-up over coffee or have the benefit of eye-contact and body language while negotiating a deal.

What do you do when you can't meet your customers face to face? How do you sell effectively where an eight-legged sales process has become redundant? How do you capture the attention of your audience and hold on to it by just being a voice on the phone? Essentially how do you learn (or in some cases, strengthen) remote selling ? Interested? Read on...

The business I lead today has been selling remotely since its inception as a team sitting out of Bangalore and selling enterprise solutions, to North American accounts. Customer travel is rare and the general mode of business is through conference calls over voice or video and of course email. So in many ways when the local lock-downs happened, while the team did have to adjust their personal lives to accommodate working from home, the pandemic has actually leveled the playing field since everyone is selling or buying remotely today!

So if you are a seller who is feeling out of control because you can't be with your customers and feel their pulse, face to face; here are the top 3 strategies that have worked for my team:

1) Preparation is key - Time is the most precious commodity when you are doing back to back meetings virtually, because with commute out of the equation, everyone is trying to jam in as much as they can into what used to be a more spaced out schedule. This means that there is lesser time for "small talk" and the agenda/content of a call needs to be bespoke. Pre-call prep while coordinating with colleagues in different time zones, locations or over virtual calls needs careful planning and execution. And as the sales person on the job, you are the quarterback of the team that needs to orchestrate synergy and this requires considerable forethought.Start by syncing your internal account team's calendars. A recurring weekly internal call between you and your pre-sales/services/support teams is necessary to check on the status of important action items. This exercise also instills a feeling of control during a situation where things seem out of place. You can then extend this weekly cadence to key customers who are used to seeing you regularly. Remember that when operating virtually, you need to meet more often - "out of sight, out of mind" is extremely relevant a statement when dating someone long distance! Preparation is key.

2) Adapt content according to the learning style of your audience - If there was ever a time to understand the learning styles of our clients and internal partners, this would be it . When it comes to absorbing information and data, no two people are the same. A good strategy to adopt when creating meeting content would be to understand the VARK model. According to the VARK model there are four types of learners - visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic. Visual learners need charts, graphs, diagrams and picture based relationship building between key concepts. This is probably why - "white-boarding" is such an essential skill for selling. How are you incorporating white-boarding virtually? What is the ratio of text to imagery in your presentations? Auditory learners like to recite information and playing it back from memory. Are you interlacing moments of silence and reflection during your product pitches and demonstrations? Asking questions that don't just uncover new information but also clarify a client's understanding of your product or service? Reading/writing learners learn best when interacting with text, which is more powerful to them than images or audio. These learners may find it the hardest to follow visually charged information or audio based meetings. Are you sending a written pre-read to your meeting in advance that can help such clients absorb more when they actually come on calls? Or following up with written material or product briefs? Kinesthetic learners are experiential learners and learn best by doing. Are you incorporating interactive demos which allow the client to get their hands dirty in a sand-box environment? Have you tried guided, customer-led product installations instead of only keeping it internally managed, to allow for 'self-serviceability'? Do your products support independent learning and ease of use? When we start viewing the content of our calls through this lens, we begin to understand that our audience is multi-modal and hence our content needs to be multi-dimensional. Adapt content according to the learning style of your audience.

3) Good direction is key to great movie making - When you are not operating in person, coordinating call flow during a virtual client meeting can become a nightmare for all parties involved if the order in which the internal participants are going to speak has not been pre-discussed. I was recently privy to one such call, where internal owners had three separate presentations that had to be stitched together at run-time; there were delays and long periods of silence as the virtual conference switched presenters and while the client was patient with us, the call overshot by 20 minutes and as an observer, I felt like someone was pulling my teeth without anesthesia! In a world that is stressed from the outside in, client patience is a rare commodity and doesn't come by often. Maintaining good call flow is essential to creating influence and controlling outcomes. A lot of this can be covered during pre-call prep, but some of it also has to do with developing the ability to switch control between internal participants without the usual comfort of non-verbal cues. Having a virtual chat group for every single key customer account that can be used to pass messages during calls is an easy way to do this. If multiple presentations or data sources need to be discussed, collating it under one internal presenter , in order - reduces confusion on the call and saves time. And don't forget to show the credits at the end of a movie in the form of meeting notes to re-emphasize on what was discussed. As trivial as it sounds, meeting notes help you outmaneuver situations of "he said, she said" which are more common with remote selling than you might think. Good direction is key to great movie making.

What strategies have worked for you or your team while operating in this new paradigm? How are your internal or external customers reacting to this change in operations? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section!

Thanks for reading!