Technology has accelerated companies to do business remotely. B2B companies, marketers, and salespeople had to embrace virtual selling and find solutions in this highly competitive space.
Remote work has changed business operations, including sales teams’ interactions with customers. Giving exceptional remote buyer experiences has become crucial for sales today. 92% of the B2B buyers preferred virtual interactions in 2022, which was 75% in 2021.
Sales teams must adjust to serve remote customers as they look online for solutions.
What are Remote Buying and Virtual Selling?
The remote buyer experience is the interaction between remote buyers and sales teams. The engagements in remote sales span from video calls and emails to social media and chatbots.
Sales teams must comprehend the distant buyer experience to deliver excellent service and establish enduring relationships.
Virtual selling uses digital technologies for sales and involves methods to communicate, sell, and convert potential buyers.
Virtual selling encompasses all facets of a digital sales experience, from the salespeople to the processes and technologies used. It creates opportunities for in-person sales as well.
Communication can happen synchronously or asynchronously.
- Synchronous communications are scheduled and real-time interactions like phone calls, live chat, or video calls.
- Asynchronous communication uses email, forums, Kanban boards, etc.
As digital sales become more competitive, companies seek to establish, formalize, and define their virtual sales strategy to maximize revenues.
Sales teams become more competitive by using sales intelligence for virtual selling.
Enhance Your Virtual Sales with Sales Intelligence
In 2021, sales teams experienced 45% sign-ups and a 43% increase in revenue per sales representative. This is against the expectation of 88% sign-ups with a 78% increase in revenue per sales rep. The gap is high.
So, what could be the reason for the gap? – Information (data)
Information is a key competitive factor in any sales situation. Talent intelligence platforms driven by AI and ML will help sales teams:
- Know their target market,
- Prioritize valuable accounts,
- Learn about decision-makers,
- Factors that drive positive outcomes, and
- How and where to contact prospects.
Sales intelligence provides real-time insights into past sales, current business interests, technology, etc., for intelligent recommendations and faster decision-making.
For these reasons, sales intelligence can offer the same benefit for virtual sales. It helps salespeople engage clients faster and boost conversions.
Strategies to Deliver Exceptional Virtual Sales Engagement
Sales teams must adopt new strategies and tools to engage effectively with remote prospects and customers. Here are some strategies for delivering exceptional remote service:
1. Personalization:
Customer retention requires personalization. Salespeople must tailor their interactions to each consumer. This includes addressing clients by name, using their preferred communication methods, and giving tailored solutions.
It is essential to hyper-target your prospects level by level to achieve sales effectiveness. Buyer intelligence identifies the right prospects and eliminates the notion of a first meeting.
With AI, sales teams act on specific insights from executives’ personality traits to roles, interests, and motivations. Buyer Intelligence’s Rolodex features personality analysis of decision-makers, including their characteristics, personality inference, skills map, and opportunity index.
Such insights create a deeper connection that can lead to a sale.
2. Active Listening:
Active listening requires focusing on consumers’ wants, needs, and issues. Salespeople must listen to customers and change their approach accordingly.
An AI-driven Account Intelligence can help the sales team know their prospects and competitors, track your prospects’ deals, and explore digital sales opportunities.
Its Deals Intelligence feature unlocks a 360-degree view into the client’s outsourcing pattern, helping sales teams understand the nature of deals and approach them with better offers.
3. Timely Responses:
Remote sales require prompt reactions. To retain customers, sales teams must reply quickly and follow up consistently, and they must also respond to changes in the industry.
To achieve this, sales teams must track deals, emerging digital technologies, and regional and global trends. Industry Intelligence has become vital for sales enablement to grab emerging opportunities.
It offers a 360-degree view of the global business ecosystem with insights into ground reality at a location, helping them to approach a new market or innovate in the existing one.
4. Transparency:
Remote customers trust transparency. Sales personnel must be upfront about products, pricing, and delivery schedules to help clients make informed purchases.
The Draup platform analyzes 16M+ data points from over 8,000 data points to help stakeholders make faster decisions.
It provides bias-free data that is curated and vetted by professionals. It is combined with AI-backed data analysis to provide hyper-targeted insights and custom strategies for the user’s pain points.
Key Technologies for Remote Sales Enablement
Sales enablement technologies are crucial to providing exceptional remote service. Here are some key technologies sales teams can employ to facilitate remote sales.
- Marketing data – A blog post, for instance, can serve as educational content to assist buyers in obtaining industry-standard solutions to their problems. Indeed you’ve seen Draup’s Resource page for the content we publish to help our clients gain the best market insights possible.
You can analyze your marketing data to determine the most successful content that meets your requirements. Use your marketing data to create informative blog articles, e-books, whitepapers, case studies, etc.
- Remote collaboration tools – With remote collaboration tools, sales teams can save time and resources, increase productivity, improve communication, and make more efficient workflows. It reduces costs and increases efficiency.
- CRM – CRMs assist sales teams in managing customer interactions, tracking leads, and analyzing sales data. Sales teams can create compelling messaging that makes selling simpler.
- Sales engagement platforms – Platforms for sales engagement, such as Draup, enable sales teams to automate their outreach efforts and engage customers more effectively.
These platforms help your team organize and store content so your entire team can access it quickly to inform and educate prospects and customers.
The Sales Enablement Platform from Draup enables your team to create hyper-targeted prospect lists that can segment accounts and stakeholders using real-time and comprehensive metrics.
Draup combines human and AI-driven curation to help sales heads, account managers, and sales teams to:
- Use industry, account, and stakeholder intelligence to micro-target high-value sales opportunities,
- Make informed decisions with unparalleled data and deep account insights, and
- Use actionable data-driven plans to increase qualified leads by 3X,
respectively.
