While virtual selling is not a new concept, the importance of properly utilizing this sales process has increased significantly over the past few years. The number of employees working remotely skyrocketed to record levels during the COVID-19 epidemic, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. This means sales teams in every industry must pivot their process toward virtual selling in order to overcome obstacles in the current market and remain competitive. While abruptly transitioning from face-to-face interactions to mostly virtual negotiations features a substantial learning curve, it also offers the potential for enormous gains.
Read on to learn more about the most common problems experienced during the virtual sales process and discover our virtual selling tips to ensure you can most effectively navigate any online negotiations. If your team could benefit from expanding their skill set into the realm of virtual sales, Shapiro Negotiations Institute can help you with customized training plans, one-on-one instructor guidance, and interactive practice to bring your team’s virtual selling techniques to a new level of success.
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Most Common Problems in Virtual Selling
The most commonly experienced problems during virtual selling include the following:
1. Keeping Potential Clients Engaged
Salespeople consider capturing the attention of their potential clients and keeping them engaged to be the most prevalent obstacle they face in virtual selling. Operating in a new environment can make any challenges seem even more insurmountable, but successful sales are possible if you adapt your current sales techniques to the digital world. Evaluate your current sales process to ensure you have a clear direction and precisely defined expectations. You should know exactly how to proceed in every stage from the first point of contact to conversion. This helps you implement your process effectively and adjust your strategy based on the buyer’s unique characteristics. You must also be willing and able to explain this process to potential clients, so they feel comfortable.
2. Changing Their Perspective
After establishing a sales process that keeps prospects engaged, the next challenge of virtual selling is changing their perspective. From the beginning of the interaction, make your process educational by providing as many resources as possible. Map out every touchpoint throughout the buyer journey, including phone calls, video chat sessions, and email messages so you remain at the forefront of their minds. Encourage conversation to learn everything you can about their interests, needs, and challenges. Remember that potential clients face significant influence from competitors, so demonstrating your value is necessary to change their perspective and move them along the conversion process.
3. Developing a Working Relationship
Just as you would with a client during an in-person negotiation, you must demonstrate a genuine interest in prospects by asking insightful questions, making them think, and offering data-driven insight. The answers they provide will likely lead to further questions and uncover additional areas where you can demonstrate your ability to meet their needs. Communicate your willingness to help them, your trustworthiness as a source of information, and your commitment to providing value beyond a simple sales pitch. Throughout the process, monitor their language, tone of voice, and facial expressions for clues about what they are thinking. Know how to respond in unexpected situations so you can remain courteous and professional while dealing with prospects.
Virtual Selling Tips
Don’t forget to leverage all the digital tools you have at your disposal. For instance, 75% of all B2B purchases were influenced by social media.
To sufficiently meet the challenges of virtual selling and negotiation, you can employ these virtual selling tips:
- Choose the Right Tools. Recognize that modern consumers have their own preferences for the virtual tools they want to use to communicate and how they would like you to receive information, so learn about these preferences and adjust your strategy accordingly for best results. Success in virtual selling and negotiation hinges on choosing the right tools and being confident in your capability to use them.
- Track Metrics. Establish a system for tracking important metrics, including the performance of specific advertising platforms, conversion rate, length of sale cycle, average revenue earned per client, and your actual sales, as compared to your goals or quotas. This tracking allows you to determine which methods result in the most success and optimized performance.
- Align Your Process With Marketing. Because marketing is fundamental in creating content and ensuring it reaches the target audience, you must align your sales process with your marketing. Do not consider sales and marketing as two distinct teams with two different agendas, but instead as part of a single, collaborative revenue team. Provide feedback on the tools you use so your teams can make timely adjustments to enhance performance.
- Prepare for the Future. Many marketing campaigns utilize software backed by artificial intelligence (AI) to better identify potential clients, provide relevant information more quickly, and guide them along in the buying journey. Sales representatives can significantly boost productivity by automating repetitive tasks such as data entry or lead prioritization.
