Iris Chan gave this presentation at the Future of Sales Festival in June 2021.
She is Head of Demand and ABM, APAC at Autodesk, and former Marketing Director and Head of Sales Development for APAC/J at Seismic.
In this article, I’ll be sharing five game-changing strategies that can help you overcome common virtual selling challenges. You’ll really be able to build a relationship centered on trust with your buyers.
Here’s a breakdown of our main talking points:
- Building a centralized content hub
- Engagement insights that drive action
- Automate content personalization at scale
- Guided selling with predictive content
- Activating Social Selling
Virtual selling is here to stay
We all know that we're in an environment where virtual selling is no longer an option. In fact, McKinsey has done some research and found that even when in-person meetings are an option, people still prefer to be conducting interactions virtually.
A lot of sales teams are still struggling with virtual selling. Gartner found that 93% of sales reps are experiencing significant challenges with virtual selling in spite of having received a lot of coaching.
In addition, research conducted by RAIN Group has found that the top two challenges when it comes to virtual selling are:
- Gaining the buyer’s attention and keeping them engaged virtually
- Developing relationships with buyers in a virtual environment
Customers expect consistent interactions across departments: 76% of them have that expectation.
However, they're finding that they're still communicating with different departments, and not to one company. There's a disconnect right there.
Also, research from Salesforce found that only 34% of companies are treating their customers as unique individuals.
For the most part, they're treating the customers as just a number, and nobody likes to be treated as a number. We can see customers want connected, personalized experiences, and they're not getting them from the sellers.
Likewise, when it comes to developing buyer and seller relationships, more than 50% of buyers say that their purchase decision is influenced by the relationship they have with a seller.
However, only 25% of buyers say that sellers are effective in developing relationships with them.
So you can see that there is a major gap between what the buyers are expecting and what they see as a priority, versus how well the sellers are meeting those needs. So how do we close this major gap?
Building a centralized content hub
The reason you need a centralized content hub is because sellers need to be responsive to the needs of buyers.
If they’re spending a lot of time trying to find the right content and trying to locate content pieces in multiple different file repositories, it can have a huge impact on productivity. Not to mention the effect on response times back to the prospect or the client.
Having a centralized content hub, where the sellers can access all the client-facing content they need (all the latest news updates, enablement resources training, sales plays, etc.) in a one-stop shop is really powerful.
Within the portal, they can enjoy these Amazon-style, AI-powered search experiences, get access to the most up to date material to make sure they're giving buyers a consistent experience.
I think this is a very effective way to kickstart the virtual selling engine. As I mentioned before, there are huge productivity gains and shorter response times for the client, which means a better experience.
Engagement insights that drive action
The next strategy I want to share with you is around engagement insights. It's really important to capture what the buyers are thinking and feeling - what their sentiment and intent is.
That's becoming harder in the virtual environment. Previously, you could catch up with them in person, look at their body language, hear the tone of their voice and so on.
With increasingly virtualized interactions, it's getting harder to read these signs and signals digitally. And yes, you might be able to jump on a Zoom or WebEx meeting but what's in between is so hard to read between now and the next meeting. This is where engagement insights become super important.
When you capture engagement insights from the buyer, it's all about getting those intense signals from them. It's about understanding what their position is and how deeply engaged they are with the materials you share with them.
If you're a seller and you're able to share content with your buyers, you want to be able to see page by page analytics.
For example, our client John looked at page two, but he skipped pages three, four, and five of the PDF that you shared with him, but he spent 10 minutes on page six. Maybe page six had something that was really resonating with John.
If you have that kind of information, you can actually have a tailored conversation with John, and make sure you just zoom into those key points that John cared about.
Because he spent so much time on that particular page, you can also time your follow up. You'll be able to get real time alerts that John is looking at that document right here and now, and you can use that to time your follow up that way.
If you have this kind of technology, you'll be able to decide which next action is best. You’ll be able to create a much more personalized conversation, making it more relevant for the buyer.
And you become a trusted advisor as a result of being able to understand their needs, where their priorities are and what really interests them.
This is a great way for you to build that trust with the buyer and at the same time for your marketing teams. They're able to measure how effective that piece of content is, in terms of replicating those winning patterns.
If this particular piece of content is constantly moving, deals forward and even helps to win deals, then it’s important for the marketing team or the enablement team to be developing more of these pieces of content.
On the left hand side of the image above is a report that a seller would receive on how much time per page the buyer is spending on the document they're sending to them (whether it's a presentation, proposal or a piece of collateral).
You can also capture information around specific pieces of content, and what the dollar value is in terms of revenue that they are contributing to, and how many deals they're actively involved in.
This proves how the content helps win the deal. So all of a sudden, you can now tie the pieces of content to actual revenue gained!
Automate content personalization at scale
We previously talked about how nobody likes to be treated as a number.
Buyers are saying that, and their message is loud and clear. They want personalization, to be treated as unique individuals, and they want sellers to understand what's relevant to them.
However, personalization is very time-consuming.
As a seller, you might not have all the time in the world to tailor documents, presentations, and proposals to each single buyer.
In fact, Forrester’s research found that over 70% of sellers are spending 14 hours a week trying to customize content for the buyers.
Now imagine that amount of time being utilized towards other more revenue generating activity. That to me, is a big opportunity to look at productivity and what you can do to help the sellers regain more selling time.
This is where automation really comes into play. If you can leverage the power of automation, you can turn hours and hours spent on personalizing documents into just a few minutes. This means you can still give the buyers a personalized experience, but you can do it at scale.
With the right technology, you're able to create a model where the sellers can self-serve, and customize hyper-relevant content assets based on the customer's industry, the segment they're in, the size of the company, the stage of the buying journey, the types of products they’re interested in, etc.
You can create all of these assets with the right formats and layouts approved by marketing in a matter of minutes, which is very important if you're in highly regulatory environments.
You can even pull in live data. If you're in the financial services industry, for example, you might need to generate investment reports, summaries, quarterly reviews with a client, and all of this will be data intensive.
You can pull in real-time numbers, graphs, bar charts and so on and this is where it becomes really powerful in terms of productivity. You can automate the updates of these visual quickly, without having to manually cut and paste.
The image above shows how that could work. You fill out a simple form, you pick a few slides, and you can generate a pitch deck, a proposal, a quotation and so on. All of these are available if you have the right automation technology.
Guided selling with predictive content
Guided selling is becoming more and more important, as sellers need to be able to share the right content at the right moment with the right audience in an efficient way.
If you have a Salesforce CRM, you can see when sellers are in a specific stage of an opportunity, and they don't have to think about what sort of content they should be sharing.
The system has a predictive engine to surface the most relevant content related to that type of customer, that industry and share those pieces of content right inside the CRM as a widget. It will also prioritize the most effective pieces of content, the ones where it was able to help with winning deals in the past.
With that kind of predictive engine, all of a sudden, you're able to find that your sellers are sharing the right content at the right moment.
Activating Social Selling
A lot of companies have started to invest in tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but you can take this a step further and provide sellers with a curated library of relevant content streams from over 11,000 publishers, plus your own brand content.
That way, they can easily share articles from the industry and from the latest market trends. This helps the sellers to be seen as authentic and client centric experts, to build relationships and continue those conversations in the social media channels.
This is a great way to build up that relationship between the buyer and the seller virtually, which as we mentioned earlier, is one of the top challenges that sellers are facing.
Think about social selling as a way to deepen that relationship. It allows your sellers to tap into third-party insights in an automated way, and helps them maximize the buyer’s engagement.
So in summary:
- You want to have a centralized content hub.
- You want to be able to capture engagement insights, down to page-by-page levels.
- You want to be able to personalize content at scale.
- You want to be able to provide sellers with the ability to share the right content at the right time, on the fly, on the go - guided selling with predictive content.
- Last but not least, you want to activate social selling.
Hopefully, these five strategies have given us some food for thought, and they are very easily attainable.
Common questions:
Q: What's the best way to create a content base that’s selling stories from scratch?
A: The best way to get started would be to invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and to look at content library technology. Those are two great starting points and you can build a programme around it.
When I was running the social selling programme at IBM, when I was trying to roll all of this out and increase the adoption, what I did was gamify the experience.
We started creating competitions for the sellers which really helped to drive the adoption and make everyone super enthusiastic about social selling.
Q: What are your thoughts on email drip campaigns? Are they still effective?
A: Yes, they are still effective, and you can definitely complement these strategies with email campaigns. It’s about creating a connected experience with a buyer.
There's always a place for multiple touch points. If you can reach them through email, you should 100% continue to do that.
But I also encourage everyone to think about engaging your clients through multiple channels, because today, researchers found that buyers like to switch between different platforms and devices, and they expect the seller to be right where they are.
If they go to your website, they expect to see you. If they are on social media, they expect to be able to engage there as well.
You need to have an omni-channel approach and make sure you are where your buyers are.
