Will selling remotely become the norm post COVID-19 for B2B and Complex B2C field sales teams?
The early signs say ‘yes’, but let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.
Many things have been tossed up in the air with the advent of the COVID-19 crisis.
Take, for instance, the boom in Zoom meetings on every level – keeping people in touch with each other across the street, suburb, state and international boundaries. It’s something many of us are getting used to.
Whether it’s Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, Facetime, WhatsApp or even the humble telephone, staying in touch and communicating with people is vital to our existence as families, friends, teams, businesses, customers, sellers, suppliers, communities, economies, states and nations. Keeping people informed about what is happening in our world and finding out what’s happening in theirs helps us make sense of the current situation and find better ways to move forward.
We wrote earlier in the crisis that Organisations are nothing without communication and relationships. And the same is true for our business relationships with our clients and prospective clients.
In business, and especially B2B and complex B2C field sales, being able to stay in touch with our customers via remote communication technology has been a business life line during this time.
But is this just a temporary stop gap until the restrictions are over?
We think not.
It seems that many businesses are realising that selling remotely for their traditional field B2B sales teams is working just fine and is also extremely cost effective.
This has caused many businesses to review their COSA (cost of sales activity).
What is COSA?
COSA is the direct cost-to-company of a salesperson, plus the proportional cost of support functions for salespeople, divided equally across the sales team.
In the case of B2B and complex B2C field sales teams, the cost of cars, petrol, insurances, airline travel plus travel time have now come into question. The cost savings are immense and productivity would dramatically improve. Just think, no more waiting or travel time and what you can do with those reclaimed hours.
So will our field sales teams become totally remote selling teams?
We don’t think so.
Hybrid Selling
B2B & Complex B2C field sales teams will likely develop a hybrid approach, meaning that they will sell remotely more often than before and in-field visits will become rarer. For instance, the weekly or monthly site or shop visit might become quarterly with other client meetings in between going remote. This is not a new phenomenon or trend, this has been on the rise for some time, but the physical isolation due to COVID-19 has accelerated this significantly. In a technology connected world we can do business and make sales pretty much with anyone from anywhere who has, at least, a smartphone. Even no-smart phones still work because we can still call over the phone.
Sure, face-to-face has plenty of advantages and there are disadvantages with remote communication as well, but remote selling is here to stay and the impact will be immense.
This will have far reaching effects on all sorts of business meetings, not just sales meetings. There is already much discussion about the collapse of business travel, especially air travel which will impact the travel, accommodation, car hire, fuel and other allied industries if this plays out in full.
Think about the events, trade shows & conference industry, that too is changing shape. In a recent interview with Karl Mattingly, CEO of Dysrupt Labs, he talked about how networking and engaging with people at conferences is rapidly changing during this crisis. He shares their experience on the reshaped global conferences and how to get to have an audience with key people at these events you now need a 50 word summary and a 60 second introduction video to present your ‘Why You?’. This is putting a whole new focus on sales messaging and value propositions that will aid remote speed networking and prospecting.
Refocusing how and when we sell
It is early days, but a number of our clients are now looking to curb their B2B field sales teams’ in-field time selling and refocusing their efforts on learning how to sell remotely. They need their sales teams to be just as good remotely as they are in person.
Also we believe that selling remotely will likely reduce the amount of ‘professional visiting’ that goes on in place of real selling. This will have huge cost implications in terms of business and sales productivity. We know that many client/sales meetings can often be social visits, not purposeful business meetings. Which is what you often get when you only measure quantity (“you have to see them once a month”) not quality. I wrote last year about 12 traps to avoid becoming a Professional Visitor. We believe that remote selling will make salespeople much more focused and accountable and it will likely improve the quality and quantity of their sales efforts.
Remote customer calls via telephone or video will quickly become a meaningless waste of time for the customer if the salesperson can’t provide meaningful content to those conversations. The cup of coffee that would have bought you 20 minutes of the customer’s time can’t bring you that anymore.
All this is why we are building out our latest online Sales Essentials program: ‘How to communicate and sell remotely’. This is currently in the form of a topic inside our online Rapid Sales Recovery program designed to help businesses and sales teams:
- Identify and prioritise viable sales segments
- Develop a Rapid Sales Action Plan
- Act with purposeful urgency – don’t procrastinate
But the ‘How to communicate and sell remotely’ program is being developed to go much deeper into a whole range of elements and variables that many business and salespeople have not factored in when it comes to selling remotely and successfully, from creating a Hybrid Selling Model to networking and prospecting remotely, and many other topics in between.
You might be asking so what’s so new about this?
Telesales teams have been in place for years.
What’s new about this trend is that we are now taking complex B2B & B2C sales into the remote world and there are many factors that need to be included that are not part of the telesales world.
Stay tuned.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
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It’s time to look ahead. It’s time to get selling.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
The time is NOW for purposeful optimism.
A year ago (roughly)
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