“If you don’t have a plan to get someone involved in a higher discussion in a virtual world, things will start to shut down quickly. In-person sales calls, which often stretch to 90 minutes or more over a meal, are more like driving on a four-lane highway with ample room to maneuver. People shut you down more rapidly,” he says. You’re not going to get the next opportunity. “If you make mistakes virtually, you’re into the wall. Virtual sales conversations, product demos and other virtual customer interactions leave less room for mistakes, says Charles Brennan Jr., president of Brennan Sales Institute and the author of “Take Your Sales to the Next Level.” A fan of Formula 1 racing, Brennan compares a virtual sales call to driving these super-speedy machines (which can exceed 230 mph). Virtual calls require more precise planning and a tighter focus. What does it mean for B2B sales managers as they strategize for 2021? Is it necessary to train sales reps on new skills? What components of an existing sales process transfer well to virtual interactions? What should sales kickoffs look like? Here are some key points to keep in mind. Even if your firm isn’t there yet, consumer behavior and the market now rests on the 2030 point on the trend line - positive or negative,” he writes. “Take any trend - social, business or personal - and fast-forward 10 years. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, states in his book, “Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” that the pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant of dynamics that were already trending. The cost savings to businesses is too significant, and the efficiencies from buyers’ perspectives too valuable, thus both sides of the sales equation will likely want to retain the Zoom meeting model for many sales calls. They estimate total air travel could drop between 19% and 36% permanently due to changes in business travel. Scott McCartney, who covers air travel for The Wall Street Journal, worked with three airline industry analysts to determine the long-term impact of COVID-19 on business travel. And there are some industries that still rely on printed catalogs and handshakes to close deals - “knuckle and hand kinds of businesses” as one source we spoke with calls them.Ĭonventional wisdom holds that even in those industries in which business was mostly conducted face-to-face prior to the pandemic, customers will be reluctant to return to that model in a post-pandemic world. Though many field sales reps are already accustomed to using web meetings or phone calls to navigate some of the sales process, what is new for a large percentage of sellers is 100% reliability on virtual interaction to sell. A Sales Benchmark Index survey from 2017 reported that in nearly 75% of sales situations, customers prefer not to meet in person. Buyers have increasingly embraced completing their own research for years. The shift to less face-to-face interaction with customers and prospects isn’t a 2020 development. ![]() Learning to manage sales virtually versus the way we’d done it historically was going to be a learning curve,” Kavadellas said. “We realized that for the foreseeable future, instead of having 12 field people and 10 inside, we really had 22 inside sales reps. When the field reps were forced to stop calling on customers and prospects in person last March due to the pandemic, the company was faced with a challenge. Orasi’s team of 12 field sales reps is supplemented with 10 inside salespeople who call on a second tier of prospects. In fact, Kavadellas, CEO of Georgia-based Orasi, a software developer, reseller and consulting firm, was scheduled to play a round with a client and a prospect the day after we spoke with him in November for this story.īut Kavadellas recognizes the golf course doesn’t suit everyone as an effective setting for a sales meeting. ![]() Nick Kavadellas is thankful for golf, not only because he’s enjoyed playing it for years, but also because it is one of the few face-to-face selling tools he has continued using during the COVID-19 outbreak.
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