Where do you stand on the big ‘back to the office’ debate? For many companies, remote or hybrid working is here to stay. And for a lot of B2B buyers’, a digital first and predominantly virtual sales experience is now their preference.

So if that’s the case, do your remote employees know what it takes to ace the remote sales experience?

Relationship Building and Outreach

A strong sales pitch starts long before you start running through your slide deck or demoing your product. The way you get to know your prospect, and the context you create for that crucial call, is everything. 

Just like comedy, one of the secrets of B2B selling is timing. You need to connect with the right people at the right moment to maximise your chances of making the sale. Reach out too early, and your prospect could be unconvinced of the value or suitability of your offer. Too late and your competitors will benefit from your tardiness.

Marketing technology makes reading the signs easier. When your CRM is integrated with a marketing automation platform, it gives you full visibility of your opportunities and the information you need to convert them. 

By collecting data from each customer touchpoint, you gain a 360º view of every prospect. This helps your sales and marketing teams to assess each prospect’s sales readiness. It also gives you the intelligence you need to be responsive to your potential customers’ needs and build a rapport.

Tracking how leads interact with your company online fills in the gaps in your knowledge. What problems are they researching on your website? Which solutions might they be interested in based on the sales pages they’re visiting? What posts are they interacting with on social media, and what does this indicate about their interests?

This helps your marketing team understand how to build demand for your services and to educate your customers, with automated workflows doing the heavy lifting. Pre-approved templates set the right tone. Your content delivers, answering questions almost as they occur to the buyer and guiding them along their journey. Every little helps to create a consistent and resonant experience for potential buyers. 

Knowing more about your buyer means personalisation can go beyond just dropping their name into generic copy. Dynamic copy and images can speak to specific service interests or industry niche. Contextual workflows can trigger ‘choose your own adventure’ responses that lead potential customers to the right information and the outcomes they need. If you can demonstrate that you’re listening to, and understanding, them, you can create a genuine connection long before you pick up the phone.

While automation should never be viewed as a totally hands off solution, it provides a baseline of hard data to work from. From individual contacts, to understanding each of the members of the buying committee and the account as a whole, you have the information at your fingertips.

Once your qualified lead is primed and ready to hand off to sales, they can quickly identify the additional information they need. They can start to customise their outreach efforts, demos, and pitch decks.

By setting a high-bar for the level of service they can expect when they decide to work with you, you make life more difficult for the competition. So finally, pay attention to the little things and never make your buyer work hard to start a conversation. 

Make sure it’s really easy to find the right contact information on every webpage, social media profile, and email signature. Reduce the friction to booking that sales call - use online booking forms and cut out the email table-tennis.

Don’t forget - you can make good use of that booking form too. They want to learn more about you at this stage, so take the opportunity for a little quid pro quo. Show you’re interested in them too, and ask some intelligent questions that will help you to prepare for the sales call.

Preparing for a Sales Call

First, and most obviously – do your homework! 

Plan the meeting, don’t wing it. Prepare an agenda, and a list of talking points. Have a clear idea of the running order and timings, and create a checklist of all the things you want this call to achieve.

Know your product or service inside and out. Gen up on FAQs and prepare your answers.

Rehearse your tech. Create an air of confidence and competence, with smooth transitions from screen sharing to slide deck to product demo.

Practice your demo. Make sure you know where to find things, and the order in which to show things that creates a compelling story. Know what it is about your product that your customer most values so you can focus on that aspect, and demonstrate the value of investing to the client.

Do your research on your main contact, their colleague, and their business. As we’ve seen above, your marketing is a great way to gather this information as you’re building your relationship with your customers.

Hopefully at this stage you’ve got a rich seam of data to mine for insights to scatter through your conversation. Perhaps your prospect has downloaded a few white papers or attended some webinars, and you’ve been able to get progressively more detailed information on their firm through dynamic lead capture fields. Maybe you’ve made good use of the call booking form, so now you have a good idea about their business’ biggest challenges and the questions they specifically need answered.

Pulling this all together creates impressive results. Thanks to the wonders of modern marketing technology, you have a clear idea about the buyer’s interests. Does your company already have useful information on the website, blog, or company YouTube channel that you can pull in?

Work with your content team to pull out or create useful pieces that address questions and provide extra value. Have links to blog posts at your fingertips to drop into the chat (and your follow up email). Use your data to dig into case studies that match their requirements to help you anticipate concerns and demonstrate what has worked for people just like them. By enriching your understanding of your buyers, you can prepare and provide information they will find valuable. 

Don’t forget that sales calls should be a conversation. You need to create a balance between getting the information you need to communicate across and leaving time to get to know the client better. If your call is 90% slide deck and demo without leaving time for some natural to and from and a Q&A, you won’t build a rapport. 

Questions create connection. They show you’re really interested in their business and help you to offer personalised advice and suggestions during the call. Don’t give yourself one more thing to think about on the day - have a list of pre-prepared questions ready to help you keep the conversation flowing. Aim to come out understanding more about their needs, and having been able to reflect that back to the prospect.

Take a leaf out of the professional communicators’ handbook and rehearse big pitches with an audience. Workshopping will help you to hone your performance and find the balance between presenting and leaving space for the customer to communicate their needs.

In some scenarios, it’s worth considering having a presentation team rather than a single rep handling the call. Rehearsals will highlight if this is necessary, and give you the opportunity to practice handovers as a team.

Invite your colleagues to give you pointers for improvements. Also, ask them to help you prepare for the unexpected. Get them to throw you some curveballs, and to try to throw you off stride. Practising rebuttals and answers to budgetary and timeline constraints, or other objections in house is better than having to improvise live!

On the Sales Call

Everything you do before the call creates the weather for the call itself. If you’ve prepared well to this point, you should be able to focus your attention on your client on the day and not on how you conduct the call. By doing the groundwork, you’ll already know what to do.

Now it’s just a case of putting your best foot forward and hoping everything runs smoothly.

First, minimise your distractions. Turn off your notifications, your phone, your calendar alerts. If you’re working on site, book quiet office space and let colleagues know what you're doing. Remote workers have other challenges. If you’re working from home, ask your housemates or family for some distraction free time. If you have pets, place them in another part of the house. Not everyone appreciates a barking dog or even a cute cat intervention.

Shut down any tabs you don’t need. Make sure any processor intensive websites, background processes, or scheduled tasks like backups or downloads aren’t running and slowing down your machine.

Make sure your backdrop and desktop is clutter free and presents a professional image. If you know you’re going to be sharing your screen and frequently switching between apps, you might want to create a clean user profile to make this easier.

As the call is happening, make a note of any commitments being made. You can do a round up of these at the end of the call so everyone is on the same page, and you can make sure you fulfil your promises. If you’re working as part of a team, you could designate someone to take these notes. Alternatively, you could use a service like Otter.AI or the options built into Microsoft Teams, OneNote or Android Recorder.

What about cold calling, or if your ideal customer picks up the phone, landing your rep in the hot seat without a chance to prepare? Your marketing technology can have your back here too. Once a lead is pulled up in the CRM, any member of your team has access to in-depth information about their needs, previous conversations, and online behaviour. 

The Effective Follow Up

Do you have a follow up strategy? At what intervals do you follow up? What do your communications look like? If there are multiple stakeholders involved, are there any undecideds who need special attention? What incentives or additional information can you provide to give an extra nudge? Do you understand your buying signals, and when it is right to back off to maintain a good relationship?

Deals are won and lost on the follow up, so don’t leave anything to chance.

First and foremost, it goes without saying -  send the information you said you would, and follow up when you say you will. Create notes and reminders in your CRM, and get your system to notify you when deadlines are approaching.

Make sure deals don’t fall off the radar and opportunities don’t go cold. Use sales automation to help keep your team organised and top of their follow up tasks. For example, you can set up notifications when a deal has been dormant for longer than average and prompt your reps to take action.

And if now isn’t the right time? Keep the lines of communication open. Set notifications to prompt your salespeople to debrief, including asking the account what would have made the difference and created a sale. Use drip email marketing campaigns to continue the relationship. Reach out during holidays, when you’re having promotions, or if you have noteworthy company news, to make sure they know that you're thinking about them.

A solid remote sales experience is built on both relationships and technology. Building a great remote sales experience depends on preparation and practice. But it's also built on a bedrock of data that helps you understand your customer.

The more data you have, the better you can anticipate their needs and react swiftly. 

But even data won’t get you the results you need without the technology to put it to good use, and the empathic skills of a great sales team who can connect with authenticity and humanity.

At 1827 Marketing, we combine content and technology to create winning customer experiences. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.