Successful consultative selling is about understanding your audience, their business, and the decision maker’s unique situation. Once conducted over a meal or in a customer’s office, today, much of the work in developing this understanding happens online before ever engaging with the customer. To be successful in remote selling, you must spend the time researching prospects thoroughly. In years past, salespeople may have been successful spending 70% of their energies making connections and 30% of the time on research and account planning, but remote selling requires inverting those activities.
Equipment Finance Sales:
Remote Selling Best Practices
FIRST
The pandemic has forced shifts in customer behavior and transformed sales behaviors overnight. Even after the pandemic subsides, remote selling is poised to be a fundamental skill set for the long term.
This best practices guide will offer tactics, tips, and strategies to maximize success while selling in a virtual environment.
Understand Your Customer or Prospect
Ask Yourself These Four Big Questions Before Developing a Plan of Attack:
Industry
State
Industry
Positioning
Unique
Challenges
Leadership
Changes
Industry
State
How much do you know about the current state of the prospect’s industry?
Search "industry name" concerns in Google news to get some high-level insight into the thinking of business decision-makers
Read the quarterly reports of publicly traded leaders in the industry. Even if your targets are smaller, they are likely affected by the same issues and the behavior of the largest players in the business
Read the quarterly reports of the industry’s large publicly traded customers. Understand what their customers are going through and how it may impact your prospect down the road
Make sure to keep up with industry-based publications online. These publications can be a terrific resource for understanding the macroeconomic, social, operational, and financial concerns facing a prospect’s business
Read their website, blog pages, and news releases
Industry associations are a great resource to understand how engaged a prospect might be in their industry and who from the company represents them. This is a great way for existing customers to prospect and leverage those similarities to create conversations
How much do you know about your prospect’s position within the industry?
Industry
Positioning
These are just some of the ways you can and should prepare before reaching out. Success with consultative selling in a remote environment requires a concentrated effort to learn and inform yourself to make every subsequent touchpoint more effective.
Once you’ve positioned yourself with the background to establish credibility with a prospect, it’s time to plan your outreach. Here are a few simple steps to ensure your messages drive the best outcomes.
Be an idea person, not a product pitcher.
In this environment, your prospects are inundated with communications from salespeople promoting their capabilities. But starting with well-informed insights about their business and combining that with a targeted explanation of what your products and services can do to help prospects solve their specific problems is a more successful tactic.
Share short thought leadership articles and other content discovered during your research and craft a narrative that addresses the near-term strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your prospect.
Engaging Prospects
NEXT
For Example:
To:
Subject:
How Are You Going to Make Connections?
Below are five resources you can utilize to help make connections.
Click on each icon to learn more.
Email is an expected and still-effective tactic. But with the virtual selling environment driving even more emails to already-crowded inboxes, it’s best regarded as just one element of a successful and coordinated communication strategy.
Email:
Whether Zoom, Teams or FaceTime, presenting through a video call is a far cry from being in the room. Here are a few fundamentals to have down to make it work for you.
Video Call Like a Champion
LASTLY
Click on each icon for tips/tricks to help you get started video calling like a champion.
Most laptops are not great audio devices on their own. Wired headsets give you better sound quality and can be more reliable. Quality wireless headsets are also good alternatives and can be worth the investment.
Use a Good Headset
It goes without saying that dressing appropriately is necessary. Beyond that, make sure your camera is around eye level. If your camera is on top of a monitor, make sure your video sharing window is at the very top of your monitor. You want your eyes to be looking at or as close to the camera as possible. And while you should make sure there is plenty of light, a window behind you will cause constant problems with appearing too bright.
Look Sharp
There’s nothing is worse than a headset that constantly breaks up or a connection that keeps dropping out. Also, make sure the communication delay between when you say something and when it's heard is minimal. Finally, make sure you understand how to share your screen and allow the person you’re meeting with to do the same.
Make Sure Your Technology Is Working
You probably didn’t imagine your dog, your spouse, or your kids being co-workers, but then most of us didn’t anticipate months of working from home, either. Even though most people understand these occasional distractions, keeping call disruptions to a minimum is essential.
Keep ‘Co-Workers’ Away
Even if your customers never do, always make sure your camera is on and working.
Always Use Video
For most of us, this is not normal. So practice a presentation and record it. Then do it three more times. Your proficiency will improve, and you will learn to spend less time wrangling equipment and more time actually presenting.
Practice
Click on each icon for tips/tricks to help you get started video calling like a champion.
LinkedIn represents a powerful and differentiated way to breakthrough. LinkedIn usage has increased by 47% since the onset of the pandemic, and using InMail can be effective with many targets. If a prospect is a premium member, that should be low-hanging fruit as they are telling the world that they see great value in the platform and engage through it frequently.
LinkedIn:
The phone is still key to success; however, making sure you have the prospect’s cell number can be more important than ever in a remote working environment.
Phone:
Video is a quick and easy way to deliver powerful messages that are more likely to drive engagement. Prospects can’t see you, so instead of just sending a text-only email, record a 120-second personal greeting linked through email or LinkedIn communications. Decision-makers are three times more likely to click on a video than an article.
Video:
Voice recordings over a short PowerPoint deck can help humanize your communications in an environment where opportunities to make a person-to-person connection may be limited. It’s easy to do, and you can save the file in .mp4 format for easy upload and sharing.
Recording:
Referring to your research, list the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your prospect and their industry in the next 12 months. This activity will help you focus your communications and value positioning around the things that are most urgent and impactful
What unique challenges are they likely to encounter in the next three, six, or twelve months?
Unique
Challenges
New leadership often puts their thumbprint on operations. A new CEO, CFO, CTO, or even ownership group might open new ways of thinking about purchasing that were previously limited
Have there been any leadership changes in the executive ranks in the last year?
Leadership
Changes
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to search for companies with new decision-makers in their roles for less than a year
The Not-So-New Normal
CONCLUSION
Understanding your prospect, creatively engaging them, and ensuring effective presentations are anything but new sales tactics. It’s just the method of delivery that is evolving. But there has never been a time where it has been more important to prepare, plan, research, and ensure your outreach is tailored to each prospect rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all communication tactic. With so many digital messages reaching decision-makers in their homes, addressing their unique needs is the only method of breaking through to drive consistent results.
Today, more than ever, you need to demonstrate your value and help your customers solve real problems in order to win more business.
Happy selling.
It’s critical that you understand the decision-making journey of your prospects. Are they just getting ideas? Are they in need of the product next month?
For each of these scenarios, think about how you communicate to the prospect and what types of information they might need:
Right Message — Right Time
Take a Few Minutes to Map It Out
Whether you want to believe it or not, the decision to acquire your products and services happens mostly without your sales staff in the room. So it is critical to make sure you are providing the right messages to help the decision process along whether you are physically there or not.
Whether you’re using Zoom, Teams, or FaceTime, presenting via a video call is a far cry from being in the room. Here are a few fundamentals to making it work for you:
LEAF Commercial Capital, Inc., a subsidiary of M&T Bank.
No need right now
Investigating product/service alternatives
Gathering proposals
A need upcoming at some point
Preparing to make a decision
A need upcoming soon
Dear customer,
I recently read this article on how businesses can struggle with long-term capital investments in an environment that increasingly favors shorter-term customer contracts, and it made me think of you. I wonder if a creative financing approach could lower your costs and preserve your capital while giving you the flexibility to the increasingly short-term needs of your customers? LEAF has been helping businesses like yours solve problems like that for nearly 30 years. Is there a time next week when we could talk about this current industry trend and how it impacts capital, cash flow, and flexibility?
Sincerely,
LEAF Sales Rep