A collared shirt paired with PJ bottoms and slippers. Endless streams of NOT crappy office coffee, made right in your own kitchen. No early morning flights and late night arrivals. For many sales people, it’s hard to remember a time where they regularly had to travel for work and take numerous in person meetings. I know, it still happens, but now that we’ve all gotten pretty used to this remote working thing, a lot of organizations have found they can cut expensive corporate office space and travel overhead by doing the bulk of communications via video calls. And while remote selling is more convenient, there are some disadvantages as well.
Over the past decade, sales have increasingly moved away from in-person meetings and toward remote selling, a sales process where interactions between the seller and buyer happen remotely via video calls, phone calls, and asynchronous communication like email. Remote sales have become particularly normalized in B2B verticals, where buyers prefer this approach.
Remote selling comes with a lot of advantages, but it also presents unique challenges. The modern sales team needs to understand and adapt to buyer expectations and remote selling best practices in order to stay competitive in today’s selling environment.
In this article, we’ll explain what we mean by remote selling, why remote selling has become so predominant, and what you can do to help your team master it.
Before we get into equipping your team for remote selling, we need to understand both what it is (as contrasted with a confusingly similar term) and why remote selling has gained such prominence.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about. Remote selling refers to the practice of sales reps interacting with prospects and customers remotely rather than meeting with them in person.
Remote selling is not the same as having a remote sales team. Whereas remote selling describes the mediums and methods sales reps use, a remote sales team describes the physical location of sales reps—distributed remotely, rather than working in the office.
Remote selling can (and often does) occur on-site at an organization’s workplace, but it also can occur remotely. Conversely, a remote sales team may sell to customers in person. However, remote sales teams very frequently do engage in remote selling, which means that most of the tips we’ll cover in this article should be applicable for both remote selling and remote sales teams.
It’s important to understand why remote selling has taken over the way it has, and why it’s likely to stick around for the long haul. There’s little doubt that pandemic restrictions boosted the prominence of remote selling, forcing most sales teams to sell remotely whether they wanted to or not, and turning familiarity with Zoom and other digital communication platforms into workplace expectations. But that isn’t the only reason why remote selling has become the norm in so many industries.
In fact, remote selling was already steadily growing in popularity prior to the pandemic. Time spent remote selling increased by 89% (from 24% to 45% of field reps’ time) from 2013 to 2017, according to a study by InsideSales. And as of 2023, 80% of all B2B sales were happening virtually, according to a report by Prezentor.
The simple reason is that remote selling works, and many customers actually prefer it. A global survey by Bain & Company with Dynata found that virtual interactions were the preference of 92% of B2B buyers. Bain & Company also found that remote selling provides a 45% improvement in win rate, a 43% improvement in revenue per sales rep, and additional cost savings thanks to less travel.
This doesn’t mean that traditional in-person selling is dead. But it does mean that sales organizations—especially B2B sales organizations—need to take remote selling seriously and ensure that their sales reps are properly equipped.
Remote selling offers tremendous potential, but it also requires a different approach from traditional in-person sales. Here are the best practices you need to know to help your team succeed with remote sales.
One of the biggest challenges with remote sales is its inherently impersonal nature. Traditional selling gives you a chance to really get to know a customer, to read their body language and gauge their attentiveness, and to make an impact personally with your own presence. This is all much harder to do over a video call (and nearly impossible over the phone or email).
But that challenge brings possibility. It means that you have a huge advantage over other remote sales teams if you can successfully pull it off. So how do you do this?
It starts with having a big personality. Some reps have more natural charisma than others, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be practiced and learned. Pair your most charismatic reps with those who struggle in this area, so they can watch and learn the skill of building connections over calls.
Reps should also go out of their way to be friendly and make a good impression. Engage in some small talk before getting to business. Pets, hobbies, and the weather make for fairly safe topics, but if you’re able to get them to reveal shared interests, all the better. Get to know them, and make sure they feel seen and cared about as a person—not just as a sales prospect.
The nature of remote selling can also turn the process of building a relationship into a set of tasks. Make sure your reps have the opportunity to develop relationships with leads, and make sure your leads are consistently interacting with the same people and not meeting someone new every call.
Asking questions accomplishes several things. It gives customers a chance to voice their concerns and feel heard—especially when reps respond to questions in a thoughtful and considerate manner. And it gives reps valuable insights into the customer’s needs and desires, which allows them to further refine their sales strategy for each prospect.
But asking questions isn’t inherently valuable. And bad questions will make customers feel like you’re wasting their time. You want your reps to ask questions that stimulate sales conversations and feel valuable to both parties.
Open-ended questions help get customers talking freely and moving the conversation forward. You want to avoid simple yes/no questions as much as possible.
For example:
The dead-ends of yes/no questions are awkward and uncomfortable in person, but even more so over a video call. Open-ended questions like this assume the yes, and ask the customer to give a more detailed answer, which is more beneficial to both of you. They outline what they want to see fixed, and you get to explain how your product or service provides the solution.
When conversations take place digitally, they can have more obstacles. It’s easier for people to become distracted, and it’s harder to read body language and shifts in tone. If you’re remote selling, it’s a good idea to pay extra attention to how you can keep the buyer engaged—and to make sure you’re staying fully present yourself.
This won’t always be possible. Depending on the resources your team has access to, it may never be possible. But if it is, you should absolutely take the opportunity to have your reps attend at least one in-person meeting with each of their prospects, even if all the rest are virtual.
When every other meeting that customer has (with you, but also with other vendors) is virtual, that one in-person meeting can really cut through the noise and make an impact that sets it apart.
It could be the first meeting you have, establishing a solid first impression that you then build on with subsequent video calls. Or it could come later in the process, adding a much more personal touch to the relationship you’ve been building up until that point, and ensuring that you’ll be top of mind from that point forward.
Value-based selling is a whole methodology unto itself, but it fits into remote selling like a hand into a glove.
The idea of value selling is based on the psychological reality that people buy things based on the value they get out of them. You don’t buy a new car for the sake of the car itself so much as you buy it for the freedom it affords, the status, the peace of mind, the fun factor, etc. And this is no different for business sales. A client subscribes to a service not for the service itself, but for how that service can help them solve a problem they’re facing.
Value selling is especially effective in remote sales because it pinpoints the core issue and helps you make the most of the limited time you have to work with. You may start by making a personal connection, but you still have to drive it home to fulfill a customer’s need, and value-based selling helps you do that.
For your reps to emphasize value, they’ll need to be clear on the specific value propositions your product or service offers, be able to identify which of those value propositions most aligns with the concerns a prospect brings up, and be able to effectively communicate how your offering provides value in those specific areas.
For example, if your reps are selling a project management tool, don’t have them list off the features it includes. Instead, have them identify the problems a prospect is facing with their current solution (“We have to duplicate task progress in X other tool”), and then explain how your project management tool will alleviate those problems (“Our solution offers seamless integrations, so you’ll never have to manually duplicate that step again”).
Your team relies heavily on the tools they’re provided with in order to sell effectively.
For remote sales, this starts with the hardware. They’ll be on screen, so they need a good webcam that presents them clearly without any distortions. They should have comfortable and supportive chairs that encourage good posture. And they need a high-quality mic or headset that allows for crystal clear audio. The last thing any customer wants is to suffer through a call with terrible audio quality.
On the software side of things, reps should be equipped with all the major video conferencing tools and familiar with each (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) so they can cater to customer preference. They’ll also need your standard sales tools like a good CRM, sales enablement platform, and sales intelligence software.
And they’ll need access to ICM software like Performio, which lets them track and monitor their progress toward goals and quotas, prioritize the best sales opportunities, see how much they’ve earned in commissions, and gain insights into their sales activities.
Remote selling is one of the top trends you should be paying attention to right now, which we highlighted in our free ebook, Sales Leadership Trends 2024: Navigate the New Normal. But it stands among several other key developments.
The sales landscape has gone through dramatic changes over the past few years, from remote selling to the rise of generative AI and much more. Things are finally beginning to settle into a new normal, but it’s vital for sales leaders to understand how today’s sales environment will be different than before.
We identified five key trends that are defining 2024’s new normal—along with ways to handle them. To read about them all, download our free ebook.
And to learn what Performio can do for your organization, request a demo today.