Introduction

Revenue teams took the hardest hit during the pandemic. A survey by the Revenue Enablement Institute found that sales productivity had dropped 20%, not just due to the fall in demand but also because of the slowness in adjusting to digital selling (both buyers and sellers). Remote selling in many organizations started as an adaptation to the pandemic, hoping to “return to normal”. However, as lockdowns have stretched between 16 to 25 months, digital selling is here to stay. Gartner estimates that “CSOs expect 60% of the sales force will remain operating virtual.”

Sales enablement for remote selling needs a new playbook, as experience has shown that not every practice common in live meetings were transferable to virtual settings. The shift in enabling sales representatives for remote selling has to be fast, yet strategic. Here are four recommendations for creating a digital sales enablement paradigm:

1. Understand the Digital Buying Journey: The virtualization of the purchase cycle has changed processes and stakeholders. It’s critical to understand buyer goals, motivations, and behaviors, and their role in the chain of command. This is particularly true when the customers are not meeting sales representatives, and thus lack the human contact that builds initial trust.
2. Retool for Virtual Sales: While a patchwork of old and new systems was the first response to the remote selling paradigm, retool comprehensively to stay in the game. 61% of CSOs are updating technology or buying new platforms to enable remote selling. Some of the technology that should be part of the sales enablement platform should be

1. customized sales collateral;
2. video-based learning and testing;
3. AI-based role-plays; and,
4. Battlecards and FAQs for objection-handling, and
5. easy integration for communications, LMS & other tools.

1. Train Remotely to Sell Remotely: 74% of sales team leaders are updating sales representative JDs to include virtual selling skills. Sales coaching needs to go digital to habituate sales representatives to a new environment, from elevator pitches to product demonstrations, to final negotiations. Alongside product collateral, video and interactive demonstrations and AI-based role-plays for various situations help the representative learn better, and in their own time.
2. Respond Faster to Queries and Objections: Attention spans are a lot smaller on the internet than they are offline, with buyers being constantly distracted. Make the collateral used for the conversation eye-catching, simple, self-explanatory, customizable instantly. Avoid long introductions. Use FAQs and battlecards to reduce “let me get back to you on this” to minutes.
3. Make Use of Analytics: Digital sales channels have the power of better lead flow management through better metrics like

1. more accurate forecasts;
2. monitoring the activities of sales representatives;
3. monitoring the health of the sales pipeline; and,
4. measuring customer engagement.

Many sales leaders are already investing in new tools to enable this transition.

6. Build & Sustain Relationships: At a time when old relationships are petering out and new ones are hard to build, double down on preparing sales operations teams for using digital channels not just for selling, but building resilient buyer-seller relationships and becoming trusted advisors. In fact, 94% of B2B customers indicated that advice and assistance from sales representatives improved their buying experience as opposed to a faceless sales process.

sharpsell equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using sharpsell have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.

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