Sales is the lifeblood for many businesses but how do you stay connected with customers in a fast changing world of restrictions and advice around working from home, without the additional time and expense of creating two separate sales tools and strategies? One for remote B2B sales and one for face-to-face.
“Buyers increasingly expect their (sales) experiences to be open, connected, intuitive, and immediate. They demand that sellers understand and align with their needs and work with them toward a common set of goals throughout the buying process. Successful sellers understand these needs and adapt their approaches.”
Forrester 2020
Flexibility is the Key To Future B2B Remote Sales Success
This is where digital sales enablement tools come into their own and can be key to future sales success. Many of the businesses that we worked with recently had no experience of these technologies. With our guidance they were able to innovate at speed, effectively accelerating the timeline of their B2B remote sales digital transformation.
It was primarily a reaction to Covid-19, but buyers liked it….
“70-80% of B2B decision makers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-serve. Why? Ease of scheduling, savings on travel expenses and (currently) safety”
McKinsey, Oct 2020
Staying connected while WFH
Sales enablement apps, designed to enhance and support face-to-face conversations, are equally powerful for remote sales enablement.
“It has made life so much easier, especially in the virtual world! The app allows me to access and browse all the sales materials I need in one place, so that I can easily show or send it to my customers and colleagues. The app is easy to navigate, looks really professional and allows me to deliver sales material in an effective way.”
Katie Bell, Senior Territory Manager, Coloplast
Sales reps can share all of their most valuable information – videos, presentations, brochures, images, facts, statistics and 3D models – using an interactive sales tool making for an intuitive and engaging buyer experience.
As interactive sales tools are centrally managed they acts as a single source of truth, used by all the sales team, irrespective of whether they are in the office or WFH. By using video conferencing and sharing the interactive online sales reps can replicate a similar experience and conversation with their customer, as if they were still face-to-face.
Virtual Events and Meetings
While video conferencing tools have been instrumental in staying connected, as we have moved through the pandemic many businesses were looking for a more immersive way to engage with their customers. This is where virtual exhibitions come in for remote B2B sales.
Our 3D virtual exhibition has allowed customers to explore and physically move around a virtual exhibit that’s been tailored to their needs. Featuring 3D product models, videos, interactive presentations and a wealth of other assets. Audiences fully immerse themselves within the experience itself, facilitating remote sales enablement.
“A whopping 47% of audiences retain the information they receive from interactive content 30 days after exposure compared to only 3% with a static experience.”
A Joined-Up Approach
All our sales enablement tools and online exhibitions can be developed in unison to create a joined-up approach to events and sales tools. By addressing both marketing channels at the same time, not only are your messages consistent across both platforms, but the development time and costs are considerably less.
Content Is Still King
The digital world is no doubt helping businesses to stay connected. But it isn’t just about the technology, content is still King and the technology really comes to nothing if the content and the user’s journey hasn’t been thought through.
“POP challenged us and guided us on the best way forward. It took me a while to get away from an analogue printed page mindset. POP’s knowledge of the user interface was invaluable.”
Clare Dawson, Coloplast Marketing
When meeting virtually, whether at an exhibition or engaging with a customer using a sales enablement tool, it’s even more crucial to consider your audience first and not the technology. Knowing what is most important to your audience is absolutely key to meeting your business objectives and having a successful virtual meeting.
Customer-centric sales tools
When developing our tools and exhibitions we do all this groundwork as part of our Customer-First Blueprint – we put ourselves in your customer’s shoes and ask those all-important questions:
- ‘What do they want?
- ‘What do they need?’
- ‘What’s their current reality?’
- ‘What are their pressures?’
- ‘What excites them?’
- ‘What wows them?’
Knowing these answers defines the customer journey, the content to be shared and the creative magic that will resonate, bringing it all to life.
Agile development
And if all of this sounds overwhelming and expensive, fear not. We use an Agile approach to development. This means a project is split into multiple smaller pieces (sprints), with each sprint being worked on in order of priority. So, a core minimum viable product can be developed first and each follow up sprint builds and improves off the lessons from the previous sprint.
This approach reduces both risk and delivers RoI faster. Read more about it in our recent blog – 7 benefits of Agile Sales Tool Development.
Switch on remote B2B sales for your business
If you want to stay connected to your customers and keep sales conversations flowing, by creating a virtual world for them to explore, or a sales enablement tool to share online – and face-to-face when permitted – we’d love to talk you through your ideas.
Help your buyers quickly make sense of complex products and information so they can make smarter, faster buying decisions.
Find out how you can use POPcomms interactive presentation software to support your buyers and sellers.
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