What Is Remote Selling ?

In the post-pandemic era, businesses have no better option than to embrace digitalization to ensure business continuity and survival. Terms like remote selling, virtual meetings, telesales, virtual selling, social selling, and digital marketing are no longer new in today’s business landscape. This is because sales organizations now understand that for their businesses to continue to grow and thrive in a post-COVID-19 world, swift transformation to remote selling is vital. Thus, many businesses today have made that transition.

This new normal of selling is pandemic-proof and would make your business future-ready in case of a pandemic. This means that measures such as restrictions, lockdown, and social distancing associated with a pandemic could no longer disrupt your business activities if your sell remotely.

Our goal in this article is to define remote selling, make you aware of the importance of remote selling to your business, and highlight the necessary elements associated with remote selling. Towards the end of this article, we provide tips on preparing for a remote selling meeting.

What Is Remote Selling About?

While remote selling may seem obvious, let’s define it again to ensure we’re on the same page. Remote selling is the process of prospecting, interacting, and engaging customers through a range of virtual sales platforms and channels. Simply put, remote selling is when a salesperson engages and sells to customers without meeting them physically or face-to-face. With the aim to carry out sales deals without restrictions, businesses have turned to channels such as email, video chat, video calls, phone calls, or social media to reach and sell to prospects. 

Remote selling is otherwise referred to as virtual selling, and it largely replaces the component of physical or in-person meetings with virtual interaction. It allows sales managers to engage prospects and sell to customers round the clock without being constrained by geographical boundaries. In this selling model, the sellers and buyers do not have to be in the same physical location for a transaction to occur. Instead, the two parties meet remotely in a ‘virtual or online space’ where buying and selling happen. 

What Are The Elements Of Remote Selling?

It is essential to have a few elements in remote selling if it is to be successful. Fortunately, these elements are not too different from selling in-person. If you want to make the transition smoothly to remote selling, you need to understand that it’s more than just knowing what a term means. 

A remote selling strategy revolves around three key elements in B2B business:

1. The business problems or challenges to solve.
2. The Agitation of that problems.
3. The solutions to such business problems.

To ensure the success of a standard remote sale, here are the critical steps to build your virtual selling model upon:

• Understand what business problems or challenges your product or service can solve. 
• Identify and target those customers facing such challenges or problem(s).
• Help that customers better understand why solving the problem will benefit their business more.
• Personalize a solution to their problem and make customers understand how your personalized solution can help solve their business problems while adding more value to their business.
• Help prospects understand how your solution is better than that of your competitors.
• Build trust with your customers by walking them through the procurement process.
• Use the power of results to kill customers’ skepticism about your solutions and make them see your product or service as the default solution to their problems. 

While the above steps are necessary for success in a standard sale, other things could make or mar the success of remote selling. The remote selling techniques and tools used to sell remotely, coupled with the virtual selling skills and experience of your sales team members, could make a huge difference between the successful remote sellers and the less successful ones within the same business landscape.

What Are Importance Of Remote Selling

There are many positive outcomes associated with remote selling for businesses. These include:

#1. Reducing travel costs and risks: With remote selling, your remote sales team can initiate and close deals with clients from various locations. There are numerous sales tools, technologies, and platforms they can explore to sell from anywhere around the globe. In many instances, they don’t necessarily have to embark on sales trips before they can hold successful sales meetings and make sales. Thus, costs and risks associated with commuting are grossly reduced.

2. Reducing the amount and price of physical office space:Sales organizations that leverage remote selling techniques and best practices can save costs on running a physical office space. This selling model allows salespeople to engage prospects and sell to customers from the comfort of their homes. Sales leaders, sales managers, sales representatives, and other remote employees in an organization can turn a virtual work environment into their new office.

3. Increasing your market reach:With remote selling, you can widen your market beyond your current areas even in the face of a pandemic. There’s no limit to your business reach, and with robust remote selling techniques, you find it easier to connect and sell to digital buyers across the globe. 

4. Increasing your sales members’ productivity rate:The time your sales reps would have spent on transit systems to meet various clients could be used to prepare and close more deals. This is the case with remote selling. Your sales reps would have no reason to bother themselves with the fatigue associated with meeting clients, especially those staying far away. Thus, they can save their energy and time for achieving more sales milestones for your organization. They also get to close more deals with clients in a day if they can sell to buyers virtually. 

5. Boosting your revenue:With travel and physical office costs reduced and your remote employees’ productivity rate increased, your sales organization can match buyer preferences by selling remotely. As a result, your sales organization will profit more because you will spend less doing business.

Remote Selling Meeting Preparedness Checklist

Whether you are holding a virtual customer meeting or a physical sales meeting, you must prepare ahead of time to ensure success. Meeting with clients virtually, however, requires greater preparation than meeting with them in person. This is because technical glitches, especially in the channels and tools used for remote selling, could prevent the meeting from proceeding as planned.

To ensure remote selling meetings are effective, sales leaders should consider the following items before, during, and after. The list includes:

Before the sales meeting 

• Are your clients familiar with the meeting technology you are planning to use for the meeting?
• Is the technology (including the speakers and microphones) you plan to use for the remote meeting working perfectly? 
• Are your meeting applications running smoothly?
• Is the meeting taking place in a conducive environment devoid of distractions and background noise?
• Are the visuals and content for your remote selling meeting available?

During the sales meeting

• Turn off all alerts on the devices you’re planning to use for the meeting; it’s advisable to mute or set your devices to “Do Not Disturb” mode.
• Do you turn on your video? 
• Do you turn on your audio?
• Do you position yourself well on the screen?
• Ensure to get permission to record the meeting for future use
• Be original and remain calm throughout the meeting.
• Are you looking into the camera? 

After the sales meeting?

• Leave the meeting room after the meeting is over.
• Save the meeting recording and call notes in your CRM or anywhere you can review it.

Conclusion

Consumers have adopted a “buy-from-home” culture in response to the recent pandemic. Today, faster 4G and 5G networks have enabled more buyers to make purchases online and don’t feel the need to meet with sellers in person. The move to remote selling may thus help modern businesses adapt to buyer preferences and become more competitive.

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