The pandemic had a momentous impact on how businesses operate. It made businesses adapt to remote working strategies in every aspect of business, including sales. Even though it created a major disruption in the sales landscape initially, this shift to remote selling isn’t a temporary one. With remote working culture gaining more traction even post pandemic, it is essential for businesses to embrace remote selling and make it a core part of their strategies.
Understanding remote selling
Remote selling is when the salesperson and customer are physically in two different locations and communicate via virtual mediums such as phone calls, emails, video calls or social media.
Strategies for remote selling
To use storytelling and personalizing your interactions
Personalizing your interactions and pitch can create a positive impression on your customer and increases the chances of building a good rapport with them significantly. Customers prefer salespeople and pitch that are personable and are inclined towards understanding their needs and preferences instead of an informal bland pitch. Using storytelling in pitch can aid in forming that rapport with client and make a lasting impression in their minds.
To plan any meeting prior
Customers have a very small attention span. By planning ahead of the time of the meeting, salesmen can optimize their interaction and convert a simple conversation into an effective sales pitch. Priorly deciding the agenda of the meeting and the type of questions to be asked to the consumer, marketers and salesmen can tailor the sales pitch and can optimize their meeting with the consumer.
To consider time zone difference for meetings
Remote selling has helped businesses eliminate the traditional geographic barrier. Remote selling has allowed businesses to have a diverse and global clientele. Knowing your customer’s time zone will help you better organize your meeting and prevent you from setting up meetings that are either too early or too late. Understanding your client’s time zone can also help you make an effective strategy. For example, by understanding the majority of your client’s time zones can help you in scheduling the publication of your material at the most advantageous moment on social media to find leads.
To record your meetings
The biggest insight provider for sales can be your own interaction with your clients. By watching your recorded meetings, not only can you better your sales pitch and gain fresh insights from your interactions and their reception of it, but you can also remember important details and concerns and address it in the later meetings.
To track consumer interactions
Sales is all about reading and understanding the customer’s body language. With the shift to remote selling, it is pertinent for salespeople to analyse and understand their customer’s digital body language. Monitoring data regarding existing and prospective clients to find out interactions on which mediums and channels are preferred by which customers, what are their requirements, and what are their problems can help drive remote sales more efficiently.
To enable tech in sales
Companies are being forced by the pandemic to modernize their infrastructure in order to give their remote sales representatives the bandwidth, adaptability, and capacity they need to provide better client experiences at lower prices. Even fundamental tools are still missing in a lot of newly remote working sales teams. Tools such as automated email response system, video chat platforms for handling numerous clients at once, platforms that can simulate in-person meetings along with CRM software are few of the tools that can enhance an organization’s remote selling strategy. Data visualization and forming dashboards for KPIs and sales results can also bring a significant impact on a sales team’s performance.
To create virtual demonstrations
By creating a virtual demonstration of your products and services, and what can it accomplish for your clients, you can improve your interaction with your consumers and can make it more optimized. The virtual demo can also be tailored to specific requirements of your audience and make it more effective.
To practice active listening
One crucial remote sales strategy that can make a sales representative stand out from the competition is active listening. Active listening techniques can also assist a representative become more focused and reduce the possibility of overlooking an important hint that could help them seal the deal. Active listening is essential for asking relevant follow-up questions, which is a significant sales strategy. This can make the client feel heard and lower the possibility of miscommunication.
Benefits of remote selling
Reduced costs
Companies promoting remote selling reduce their costs significantly. Travel expenses, everyday commute, and office space, all the big avenues that contributed as the biggest cost factor in the traditional work mode are eliminated with remote working. Even small regional businesses with limited resources can now compete with big MNCs thanks to remote working.
Increased productivity and efficiency
Remote selling helps salespeople cut down a lot of unnecessary time spent on monotonous and routine work and utilize it for other productive activities. Salespeople can utilize the time they used to spend on travel for client meetings and daily commute for scheduling more meetings, refining sales pitch, reach out to more people, etc. Along with enabling employees with their preferred environment, remote selling also eliminates the usual distractions that employees used to face like an interruption from a coworker, phone calls and meetings etc. With this they can concentrate better and be more productive.
Better work-life balance
Since salespeople can work from anywhere at any time, remote selling can promote a better work-life balance. Remote selling allows employees to schedule their professional calendar according to their personal one as opposed to the traditional in-person employment. This leads to an improved work-life balance and more content and satisfied employees.
Easy scaling up
With virtualization of businesses, it has become easier for businesses to penetrate the global markets. Remote selling can make it easier for salespeople to engage and pitch to customer in other cities, states or even countries. With the use of technology such as CRM, it is easier and more convenient to grow your sales and scale up your business. Remote selling allows companies to increase their customer base and expand into wider markets.
Conclusion
More than just a temporary response to global circumstances such as pandemic, remote selling has become a fundamental shift in how businesses approach sales. Embracing this change and making it a part of the core strategies whilst recognizing the enduring benefits of remote selling are some of the crucial steps for businesses that aim to thrive in the dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of modern commerce.
