Virtual Selling: Building Relationships, Differentiating and Winning Sales Remotely

By Tom Pisello | May 22, 2021

How do you build rapport with prospects, even though you are now limited to a 13″ virtual meeting screen? 

How do you make sure you are not losing buyer engagement?

How do you pivot from pitching to blueprinting business value?

In my interview with co-author of the book Virtual Selling and sales training expert Dave Shaby, we answered these questions, as he provided the research and advice you need to accelerate your seller’s digital success. He had much insight to impart. Here are a few take aways:

On virtual selling being here to stay:

“The headline is definitely here to stay. In fact, pre-pandemic 50% of selling was virtual. Interactions were virtual, so now that we are at perhaps an 80% mark, we see that directionally as where things are going to end up and there’s a few reasons why. One is the practical reasons of cost and efficiency and so when companies realize and understand that-when you take travel, and time, and certain elements that really sort of impact the ability for salespeople to be completely of value add for their potential clients: Time spent in airports, time spent in transit, all of those things… If you can add that back to the equation and relay that back to your clients there’s a better story.

The other part of it is it can be effective, right? Virtual selling done well has through research been found to be just as effective If not more in certain circumstances, particularly with complex enterprise selling. You know you can’t substitute relationships, and we’ll talk about that I’m sure a little bit more, but just to the extent that effective selling done more efficiently at a lower cost one would argue that that’s enough reason to believe it’s going to not only stay, but that it is an area of opportunity.

Buyers want a concrete ROI but many sellers are not adept at delivering:

When sellers do bad ROI cases, not case making, but cases, buyers often will look at that as a rejection item. Meaning, they are just trying to sell me something where that did not contextually work for me at all, it’s unrealistic, this is “snake oil”, or whatever they might think. So, you know the backfiring on the ROI is a real thing, and that gap suggested happens more than we know. And so, for sellers, what we suggest again is be process driven, be simple, get the story around the numbers right, and think about how to make the levers modest, and you’ll probably be in way better shape.”

Check out the full episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SNfpC6ee6caMYgOBZKXvv

Keep Evolving EVOLVERS!

Until next time…

#digitalselling #remoteselling #salesenablement #salesreadiness #RAINGroup #valueselling #businessvalue #businesscase #ROI #ValueGap

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