The essential ingredients for salespeople to rapidly build a pipeline in addition to selling competence are virtual presence, video competence, brand mojo, and visual conversation frameworks for synchronous and asynchronous selling. Each element in the pipeline growth equation is important but they are accretive and help salespeople to capitalize every moment on camera in front of buyers.
Combined they are synergistic, meaning the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When a sales team embraces this combinatorial synergy, everyone on the team achieves more. Let's explore how by exploring each ingredient.
Virtual presence is:
Virtual presence builds on a foundation of video competency and a great virtual presence is impossible to achieve without it.
Video competency means a setup that enables salespeople selling from home or an office to be the best they can be on a video conference.
Video competence requires a minimum equipment investment to achieve the following:
Doug Kessler from Velocity Partners in London nailed the term brand mojo in relation to salespeople.
“Mojo is confidence, attitude, energy, and passion. It’s your voice and your stance and the banner you wave as your team marches down Revenue Street towards the Mall of Fame."
Brand mojo for remote salespeople is:
What salespeople wear on camera impacts brand mojo. Professional attire on camera creates more gravitas than tee-shirts, hoodies and baseball caps and it shows respect for the buyer.
Visual conversation frameworks combine a physical or digital drawing surface into the video conference. Conversation frameworks create structure for true dialogue between buyer and seller. This enables both parties to communicate more effectively about what they want at each step in the buying process. Frameworks vary across the buying process from discovery to implementation and onboarding.
These conversational frameworks are populated live during the meeting with the buyer and help to create mutual understanding. Post meeting with the buyer, they are reused in asynchronous selling applications and video to build mindshare and to confirm qualification. Used effectively they increase win-rate.
Last month Enableocity launched its Remote Selling Mastery brand for the training services to deliver all of the above services.
Step 1. Basic setup: includes video competence and virtual presence.
Commencing with an audit of existing virtual selling setup and video competence, we help sellers to get set up for professional selling over video whether working from home or in the office. In a budget-constrained environment, salespeople should be well equipped for under $300. Enableosity also offers a studio-quality set up in partnership with Deskrig.
Step 2. Brand mojo
Once a green screen and lighting are in place, strong branding of virtual backgrounds creates consistency across a sales team. Salespeople who believe in brand mojo dress for success and wear what they wore on sales calls pre-covid. The difference in virtual presence and brand mojo that we see before training and equipment setup and after training is remarkable and salespeople themselves love what they see.
Step 3. Conversation Frameworks Training
Training consists of a series of immersive 1.5-hour roleplaying workshops and eLearning tutorials over a period of up to 6 weeks, depending on how many conversation frameworks deployed. Workshops are kept deliberately small with a maximum of 25 per group to enable mentoring and peer learning.
Step 4. Take the next step and talk to us about how you can drive pipeline growth by re-equipping and upskilling your sales team for a virtual selling world.