Establishing Meaningful Connections in a Remote World
In 2020, everything has gone digital. We shop for groceries on Instacart, we meet with co-workers over Zoom, we get our travel fix on Instagram, and then, of course, there’s Amazon. 2020 has pushed the notion of digital transformations from a rising trend to a necessity.
These shifts were already in motion, though; the pandemic simply accelerated them. Sales teams especially faced the need to adopt and lead new digital strategies.
In B2B, millennials are quickly becoming the majority in both selling groups and buying groups, and they are digital natives. Their first instinct is to go online when they need to buy or sell. It’s not hard to do either—about 62% of the sales journey can be done online before ever talking to a salesperson.
Brands must recognize the implications of digital transformations, and have tools to help them embrace it in the right ways.
Buyer Centricity: Engage Well and Often
Sales teams are learning they can get just as much done, if not more, from their homes. There’s going to be debate about the long-term justification for physical offices, and there’s already discussion about mental health and social engagement with colleagues. But a lot of you have figured out creative ways to keep your employees happy and with a better work-life balance.
None of this, however, takes away from the responsibility for sellers to know how to make meaningful connections with buyers.
Sellers have to be faster, more content-rich, and more instrumented in their processes. To do this, they will need a tech stack to guide them.
4 Tactics to Increase Connections
A sales engagement platform such as Playbooks can guide your sellers in making those meaningful connections. This is because of a few key features:
- Stay on top of opportunities: sales engagement can help you prevent leads and opportunities from slipping through the cracks. With orchestrated plays, your team can review and easily follow to-dos for the day, including staying on top of urgent and past due tasks. They’ll know exactly who to engage, on what channel, and when to increase their odds of building and closing pipeline.
- Customizable prioritization: your sales leaders can establish rules, sorts, and filters based on the activities and outcomes you value most. Engage the contacts and accounts that are most likely to create value.
- Data insights that matter: the most valuable resource your sales team has is time. Sales reps only spend about a third of their time actually selling. Sales engagement should proactively alert sellers to relevant insights about their buyers, along with their behaviors, and even indicate which are most likely to engage and buy.
- Automation: there are certain things reps should always own and do, but there’s quite a bit that should simply be done automatically. Automation systems and rules in sales engagement should give your sellers a lot more time to actually sell.
Sales engagement can be one of the most powerful tools for remote and digital selling, but it takes more than having just this one tool. You need content.
Buyers should be offered an intuitive self-learning experience about the platforms they need to adopt. They don’t want to jump on the phone with a salesperson as soon until much later in their buying journey.
Self-guided buying journeys require relevant, adequate, and available content. And not just for buyers! Your sales team must be well-versed in the story you’re telling. By enabling a remote sales team, you also enable the remote buyer. With so much of buying and selling now occurring in digital channels, having the ability to meet your buyers where they are is crucial to winning over your competition. Download our ebook, The Future of Sales, for more information on where sales is headed and why you need to look into remote selling.