How to Create a Virtual Sales Process?

A virtual sales process refers to steps or actions a sales rep takes to turn a potential lead (prospect) into a paying customer remotely. It’s a framework that simplifies your sales cycle and helps your sales team consistently close deals.

In this post, we will help you understand what virtual sales means and how to transition from in-person to virtual sales successfully. We’ll also help you understand how to create a remote sales strategy powerful enough to win you more sales.

What Is Virtual Sales?

Virtual sales is like traditional or in-person sales but with business activities taking place in an online space. When it comes to virtual sales, the sales process ranging from prospecting to sales meetings, customer interaction and engagement, and closing sales deals all happen remotely. Video calls, phone calls, video conferencing, social media, digital channels, and virtual meeting software are what sales organizations leverage to grow their businesses in today’s digital world.

How To Successfully Shift From In-Person To Virtual Sales?

Due to what the business world has experienced in recent times, it’s now crystal clear that sales organizations need an entirely new selling system other than the in-person sales approach.

As a sales leader, now is the time to successfully shift from in-person to virtual sales to adapt to any business circumstance and grow your brand. If you’re still struggling with this transition, the following tips can help you adapt your sales process and generate leads without meeting your clients in person.

Be Present On Relevant Social Media

According to Statista, 4.65 billion people worldwide actively use social media as of April 2022. This is like saying that more than half of the world population (58.4 %) hangs out on one form of social media channel or another. Facebook alone has over 2.89 billion active monthly users, making the platform the most used social media platform globally.

Social platforms are undoubtedly where sales reps can find and engage a more significant percentage of prospects and sell remotely at next to zero cost. Thus, sales leaders should have a strong presence on social media and use the platforms to their maximum capacity as they transition from in-person to virtual sales. It would be best not to miss out on the opportunity to generate massive leads for your business in a non-invasive manner.

Have A Mobile-Friendly Sales Platform

We are in the digital era where people would continue to rely heavily on smartphones to surf the internet for all kinds of stuff. A recent study by Statista reveals that 6.57 billion people around the world use a smartphone today, and the figure is projected to reach 7.69 billion in 2027. This means that 83.72% of people currently own a smartphone globally.

A sales organization considering selling virtually to buyers would want to think mobile-first to target these billions of audiences who want to solve a problem via smartphone. As a sales professional, it’s crucial to set up a sales platform that looks good on mobile and allows options for real-time support to send prospects directly to your sales team.

Create Superior Value In The Target Market

Prospects only care about their needs and would keep looking for ways to solve their biggest problems. As a salesperson, you should always aim to help your target clients with their needs and let value be at the forefront of your online marketing campaign. If you do this, you’ll get to build a strong word-of-mouth foundation for the purpose of word-of-mouth marketing for your sales organization remotely. Thus, your transition from in-person sales to virtual sales will come easy for your sales rep.

Connect Well With Prospects Virtually

A salesperson should interact well with prospects to understand their actual needs. Don’t just focus on closing deals quickly with your customers, but instead find a means to build a long-term relationship that will benefit both parties.

Be empathetic and actively listen to your prospective buyers to learn about their situation and how you can turn them into paying customers moving forward. If you can consistently engage and connect with prospects at the interpersonal level, selling virtually to them would not be difficult.

How To Create A Winning Virtual Sales Strategy?

Today, sales organizations with success stories are the ones following the right sales strategies and sales practices. Your success in the digital spaces is a function of the sales strategy you put in place for your sales reps. Thus, it’s vital that you have a sales strategy that your sales reps can flawlessly execute if you’re engaging clients in the virtual realm.

Here are a few tips for creating a winning virtual sales strategy for your salespeople.

#1 Define Your Virtual Sales Process

A proper virtual sales process is key to winning more sales virtually. A straightforward sales process provides a specific roadmap for your sales team to follow in executing your sales strategies and plans perfectly. Redefine your sales process and ensure your sales team gets full ideas of what each sales stage represents in your buyers’ journey.

Test out a process from prospecting to closing deals with customers and all other sales stages that come in-between. Request constant feedback from your sales team and continue making necessary adjustments to your virtual sales process until it gets you the desired results.

#2 Get The Right People On Your Sales Team

Besides having a standardized sales process, the most important thing is to have the right people executing your sales process for you. It would help if you built a winning virtual team that can execute your sales strategy flawlessly. Sales professionals with the right virtual selling skills and experience in the digital space would be your ideal candidates for this job.

#3 Use The Right Virtual Selling Tools

It’s important to point out that the whole idea of virtual sales is centered on the use of sales tools and event technology. Your sales reps need the right tools and platforms to run your virtual sales calls and hold virtual sales meetings with your prospects and customers. Your sales team is meant to leverage relevant tools to speed up the sales process.

Invest in high-quality video conferencing tools, sales collaboration tools, virtual event platforms, and sales enablement tools. The more of these sales tools and technology your team has at their fingertips, the more the capacity to close more deals virtually.

#4 Create An In-House Library For Your Sales Team

You’ll need to provide your sales reps with all the materials and resources they’ll ever need to get the job done. This is where you need an in-house sales library. When your sales reps have access to various resources and materials to generate leads, they will close more sales and drive more revenue for your sales organization.

Your virtual sales library should house webinars, case studies, fact and figure sheets, slide decks, on-demand videos, and other helpful information your sales team will ever need to close a deal.

#5 Pay Attention To Your Key Sales Analytics

Finally, it would help if you frequently measure the results of your virtual selling process by paying attention to your key sales analytics. Keep an eye on the soft and hard metrics that tell you how your strategy is doing (either well or not).

Critical sales metrics to keep under a close radar include your email campaign open rates and click rates, meeting sign-up rates, win rate, retention rate, and churn rate. These sales metrics can be an excellent indicator of your virtual sales process performance and tell you where you need to make the necessary adjustments to your strategy.

Now that remote selling is the ‘new normal’ way of doing business; sales organizations must create a standardized virtual sales process to support their sales reps. With a proper virtual sales process on the ground, your salespeople get to know precisely what to do at different sales stages. And when this sales process is combined with the right sales strategies, your sales team gets to ensure your marketing endeavors don’t go to waste.

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