Virtual Selling Success: From Pitching to Prescribing with a Problem Solving 101 Approach: w/ Tim Wackel (Sales Trainer/Speaker/Sales Hall of Fame Inductee)

By Tom Pisello | October 12, 2021

When selling virtually, sellers are reporting some serious challenges, including the ability to connect, get stakeholders together, gain consensus and instill confidence in the decision, this according to Gartner. So how do you best overcome each of these challenges?

To understand how best we tapped the wisdom of Tim Wackel, a leading sales trainer, keynote speaker, and executive presentation coach, an inductee in the Sales Hall of Fame, and a sales leadership veteran of Agilent Technologies and HP.

“So, my hypothesis is, and again this would just be three decades of experience speaking, Tom, is I think if you ask sellers pre-Covid what their number one challenge was, I think they’d still say gaining access to stakeholders… If you struggled getting access to stakeholders before we went virtual, you’re probably really struggling now. And you know, what I see happening in my world as a business owner is everybody wants access, but the access is “let me send you a LinkedIn Invite”, and the minute I accept, they go right to the pitch, and it makes my skin crawl.

You have no idea who I am,Where I’m coming from, what I’ve done, where I’m trying to get to, and… We have to get back to the basics. And I always like to think of it Tom, as having a good sales story. A good sales story answers two questions. Why you? And why now? And if you can’t articulate why I should be talking to you, and why I should be talking to you now, I don’t care if you’re face to face or your virtual, you’re going to struggle. And I think for most salespeople, myself included, it’s hard to tell a compelling sales story.“

“Well, I think Tom, that Pre Covid, you know when you get a face-to-face call with a customer, I think the customer just automatically assumed to be a half hour, 45 minute, one hour call. They would carve chunks out of their schedule to accommodate you. You know, a lot of folks are still working from home. And they’ve got a spouse or a partner that’s working from home. Maybe they’ve got a couple of kids under the age of 12 that are learning from home. So, it’s very chaotic, and where I think I’m having more success is not to ask for a bigger chunks of time, but to ask for smaller chunks of time, and get more of them. Which allows me to get a little more momentum, and what’s the magic rule? Always leave them wanting more? So, you know, ‘hey listen we’re just gonna spend 20 minutes today’… The old get together an agenda, everybody knows what’s going on, what the objective for the call is, and I see this happening all over the next 3 to 4 weeks and we talk every Tuesday afternoon and… It’s being an expert facilitator, and not looking for those big- you know nobody wants to see themselves on video for an hour. Right? It’s like a 15 to 20 minute chunk. Let’s get it done. Let’s roll again next week. Give me some time to synthesize this, I want to come up with some new questions, And some new insights. Let’s meet again. I think that’s brilliant advice.”

Check out the full episode here! https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Afz1goO2hLg8Pdz4DnX0i

Less is definitely more, peeps.

Keep evolving, EVOLVERS!

Until Next time…

#salesenablement #remoteselling #digitalselling #virtualselling #salestransformation #salesperformance

Comments are closed.